


Struggling

by chronicAngel (orphan_account)



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Background Relationships, Bat Family, Birds of Prey, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Nightmares, POV Third Person, Paralysis, Post-Killing Joke, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Wheelchairs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2018-11-22 21:17:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11388597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/chronicAngel
Summary: The wind that blows her hair reminds her of cold Gotham nights when she still went out in kevlar, and if she closes her eyes and spreads out her arms she can almost imagine that feeling, like she’s flying. Of course, the fabric of her button-up is not kevlar, and she knows that she can’t relive her glory days. Her days as Batgirl are over, no matter how hard she could try to reclaim them, and perhaps that’s for the better.This fic has been abandoned. It will not be added onto.





	1. Fantigue

**Author's Note:**

> fantigue  
> n. State of worry or excitement

_Her nails dig into her skin as she clutches at the wound, body racking with sobs and every inch of her shaking as she is more aware than she should be of just how much pain she is in. Glass from the broken coffee table cuts her skin every time she tries to move and her gut burns more intensely than any case of indigestion she has ever had (which, the logical side of her would point out if she were able to focus, makes sense, being that she has been shot), and she can't feel her legs, though she tells herself that this is because she is more focused on other things as a small comfort. Her fingers are slippery against each other and the whole room smells like gunpowder even what feels like an eternity after the bullet has fired off. Her mouth tastes like copper._

_She wants to fight him as he moves his hands over her body, stripping her slowly of her clothing, but she can't move her hands from where they clutch at the blood-soaked fabric of her blouse. She is hyper-aware of blood and dirt under her nails._

_The white face that used to haunt her nightmares as a kid is grinning down at her and he speaks ever-so-politely even as he strips her against her will and tosses the clothes aside into a pile of glass and blood that is only a small ways away from where she is laying. Her glasses are nowhere to be seen, but that grin is burned into her brain like a brand on a cow's backside and even when she squeezes her eyes shut she can't get the image out of her head as she hears a camera flash._

_A fish struggling to get back into the water as it has been cruelly left to die on the shore, she practically has to tear her hands away from her abdomen as she cries and squirms so she may be able to reach her clothing. She is left on the floor, covered in cuts and still unable to move or feel her legs as she tries to reach her clothes when he leaves, and she hears that laugh ringing in her ears even hours after Colleen finds her and calls the police, hours after she is taken to the hospital to be treated; it keeps on repeating in her head, the echo of a ghost that only gets louder when they put her under for surgery._

When she wakes, it is with a guttural scream that tears itself from her throat.

Her mind is like a machine, running like simple clockwork and only registering her environment. She registers the sticky layer of sweat coating her skin, as well as the familiar stinging in her eyes of tears as scalene burns her more than any fire could. She accidentally scratches the arm draped over her abdomen in her rush to shove it off of her, even going as far as to shove the figure in bed next to her onto the floor as she panics and attempts to scramble away from the threat that she hasn't yet realized is only the phantom of a memory.

She registers that Dick is now awake, staring at her with wide blue eyes that are filled with concern, but waiting to touch her until she is pulled back into the real world, no matter how much he may want to.

She registers that each breath she takes is heavy, and it feels like her organs are rattling with the force. Her pants dissolve into sobs as she pulls her knees into her chest and has to hold them there so they don't fall back onto the bed and take her with them. She registers the arms that wrap tightly around her a moment later.

Trying to get words out but failing about as miserably as she would if she attempted to swallow her own tongue, he shushes her and whispers assurances into her hair that it's okay, but she knows that it must torture him more than he says that he has a girlfriend who's _broken._ She hyperventilates instead of breathes, but he just holds her and continues to tell her that she's okay, that he's here now and he won't let anything happen to her.

A part of her needs to hear this. On a normal day, she might be upset. They both know that she can hold her own. Her years as Batgirl, fighting alongside him despite a lack of formal training outside of martial arts classes at the cheap studio in Downtown Gotham through middle and high school and a year of Krav Maga in her junior year, taking out the trash of Gotham City every time it swam back from the gutters whence it came proved that. Her years as Oracle, single-handedly running an organized crime-fighting syndicate entirely over the computer and making sure groups like the Justice League and the Teen Titans had a solid tech guy to fall back on whenever Bruce or Tim were out of commission proved that. But right now, as the sun peeks over the skyscrapers of Gotham in a blood red and orange sunrise unofficially marking six in the morning, she needs to hear Dick's promise to keep her safe.

She peels herself away from him, eventually, the sweat cooling on her skin, leaving her to feel even stickier and grosser. She stays in bed next to him, though, and lets him hold her hand to help quell his worries and perhaps even because she needs it a little bit, too. She needs to feel his calloused thumbs brushing over the thin bones in her hand and fingers, needs to feel whispers of kisses against her shoulder once the air grows slightly less tense and he decides it’s safe to lean closer to her. He murmurs against her shoulder, quiet enough that she can pretend she didn’t hear him if she wants to, “Was it the one with the door?”

She shudders and shakes her head, but doesn’t actually answer him.

He hums in thought for a moment and then continues, still quiet, still too soft at the edges, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” There’s a note of finality in the word that startles her, but she doesn’t amend it.

He nods and goes back to the quiet, his kisses against her shoulder venturing up until he’s peppering her face in delicate busses and whispered apologies that she’ll never understand but will be forever grateful for. She’s not sure when she leans into him, but she finds herself resting her weight on his sturdy frame and the pillows on his side of the bed, a sense of security washing over her pleasantly.

Eventually, he makes a move to get up, to shower most likely. She catches his wrist without thinking, staring at him with owlish, desperate eyes, and his expression softens in turn.

Her skin crawls under his gaze. He has always had the ability to do this to her, to make her squirm underneath his affectionate looks and gentle touches, but it has only been amplified since her injury. He always shows such genuine affection. It's a strange thing, the love expressed by Richard Grayson.

Quietly, he moves to lay next to her again, his arms wrapping tightly around her waist, and she tenses as she can feel his fingers ghost over the scar from the bullet wound on her abdomen before she leans into his light touches.

She doesn’t know how long they lay there, tangled in each other. She doesn’t know how long she feels his fingers carding through her messy hair, or his lips brushing against her cheekbones which have never been as pronounced as his, or his face resting tiredly against her shoulder. By the time they pull away from each other, her breaths come to her much more easily but the light that streams in through her blinds in lines that catch the dust comes from a pale grey-blue sky. The moment, however long it may have been, passes, and he stands to shower while she drags herself into her chair with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

She wheels herself into the kitchen, grabbing a slice of cold pepperoni pizza from the grease-stained box on her coffee table while she passes and picking up Dick’s socks from their place on the arm of the couch after they were messily discarded. The cheap little coffeemaker on the corner of the counter makes lukewarm coffee unless you boil the water first (sometimes, even _if_ you boil the water first), but it can brew a whole lukewarm pot in only two minutes, which is less time than any expensive espresso machine that Bruce could buy her which allows her more time to dedicate to her work. Dick has always taken quick showers, unlike Stephanie, who spends at least fifteen minutes washing her hair when she is over, or Jason, who probably goes through the exact same routine, and so she pours him a cup of coffee and shoves it in her microwave to warm it up. When he does get out, he crinkles his nose when he sees her drinking hers black as he dumps what must be half a cup of sugar into the mug.

Barbara taps away at her computer while Dick pulls the only chair at her table around to sit and look over her shoulder while he sips at his cup of coffee and steals sizeable bites of her slice of pizza until she reminds him that there is still half of a cold pizza in the box. Idly, she skims through Helena and Dinah’s logs from last night, pleased with the report that the men running the dog fighting ring they busted last night were all arrested.

She glances at Dick out of the corner of her eye as he pulls a t-shirt over his head, still-wet hair dripping spots onto the shoulders. Her eyebrows shoot closer to her hairline and she pushes herself back from the table and her computer a bit. “When’s patrol start today, Officer?”

He looks amused by her joking tone, shimmying his way into his jeans before answering, “Ten. I normally work at nine on Mondays,” she already knows this, used to waking up early on Monday mornings despite typically long Sunday nights, but lets him continue, “but I worked overtime this weekend for the Scotty Antonelli case.” She already knows this, too, because normally Friday nights are date nights and he’ll stay the entire weekend, but he was busy with following dead ends and playing good cop with one of the new boys in blue so he hadn’t been able to make it out until yesterday evening. She’s only a little bit bitter that she didn’t get to spend the whole weekend with him, but of course she knows his reasons. She can’t be too mad, not really. “Rohrbach tried to get me to take today off, and I would have accepted, except...”

“Except that’s a kid out there.” She’s been trying to help with the Scotty Antonelli case as much as she can when she’s also busy with the well-being of every Gothamite and whatever they call the people who live in Star City. It’s personal for the both of them, even if neither knows the kid. “I know, Dick.” She sounds tired, but her voice is still as gentle as she can make it. Changing the subject before he has the chance to wallow in his perceived failures, she offers, “So. Ten. That’s three hours.” He nods, but seems confused about why she’s mentioning this so she adds, “It’s only a two hour drive to Blüdhaven. That means we have an hour to ourselves.” Comprehension must dawn on him, because his expression shifts to a goofy grin that reminds her of when they were teenagers.

He wraps his arms around her waist as he dips in to kiss her, and she leans up as best she can until he’s finally scooping her up from the chair, wrapping one of her legs around his waist and leaning the both of them against one of the nearby walls. The hand that doesn’t hold her leg rests on the wall beside her head.

She groans low in her throat as her phone rings from where she’d abandoned it on the table right as he grazes his tongue across her lower lip, and he puts her down in her chair so she can answer it despite her whined protests. When she sees Bruce’s caller ID, she supposes it’s for the better that he did, even if a call to her cellphone means that this has nothing to do with their shared night jobs. “This is Gordon,” she answers, the same neutral greeting she uses with everyone but the dork behind her.

Rather than an equally-neutral greeting in response, though, what she gets is what sounds like an explosion in the background, two familiar boys’ voices yelling at each other, a dog barking in a way that sounds too impatient to be Ace, and... mooing? “Barbara,” he says, curt, and she can hear the lack of coffee in his voice. She doesn’t even have to ask what’s wrong before he continues, “I've raised three boys at this point, yet they each somehow manage to top the last in difficulty to keep still."

The time that she and Dick got drugged by Poison Ivy and had to be kept in separate rooms for a weekend flashes through her mind, as well as the time that Jason nearly blew up the Batcave during one of his temper tantrums because Bruce had let Catwoman slip away _again_ and the time that Tim brought the whole computer system crashing down to play a game.

She raises a brow quietly, humming in consideration and deciding she doesn’t want to ask, before saying, “Bruce, you've kicked the snot out of practical demigods like Darkseid, I'm sure you can handle an eleven-year-old boy who can’t walk past a dog without petting it.” He doesn’t answer immediately, and it sounds like he turns his head to yell something over his shoulder at the boys. By the time he turns back to answer, Dick is sitting next to her again, listening closely to catch their conversation.

There’s a struggle for the phone before he can respond, and she hears Damian and Tim yelling something indecipherable at each other as they both struggle to rip Bruce’s smartphone from his fingers, which is probably only such a struggle because they’re both trying so hard. Tim gets half a word in, and then Damian does, and then the phone is hung up and she’s left to wonder if it was on purpose on Bruce’s part or an accident on the boys’.

She ignores the ensuing text from Bruce in favor of turning back toward Dick, hauling herself to the edge of her chair and then draping her arms over his shoulders. He’s kind enough to press his lips into hers, since she can’t quite reach him without falling out of her seat, and then they’re falling back into step with each other (figuratively) and she’s dragging him toward her bedroom (literally). His lips are soft, which she knows is because of the cherry chapstick that she’d still been able to taste traces of last night, and he’s very warm. His hair isn’t dripping anymore, but it’s wet as she runs her fingers through the short curls.

Tugging just slightly, she relishes in the small huff of hot air that fans out over her lips as he exhales sharply. She finds herself on her back on the foam of her mattress faster than she has time to pull her shirt off over her head, and though she is distinctly under him, he still rakes his nails against the skin of her back; she always shivers at the sensation of sharp pain and then nothingness as he finds his way past the place where she can’t feel anymore. She feels her hips lift a bit as he lifts her legs to hook them around his hips, her ankles crossing at his back so they don’t slide down when he moves his hands.

She groans with impatience when _his_ phone buzzes in his pocket, her hands halfway up his shirt.

Unfortunately, his work still has full potential to call him, and so they pull away from each other so he can answer. “Hello?” The call that follows is shorter than even the maybe-three-minute conversation she just had with Bruce, and she doesn’t bother to listen in under the assumption that it is possible this is something personal, something private she isn’t meant to hear. When he hangs up, his face is apologetic. “They think they have a lead on the Scotty Antonelli case.”

She breathes, everything in her face softening despite her lingering frustration. “Go. I’ll still be here later.”

She recognizes gratitude as he places a final kiss on her lips and pulls away, pushing her wheelchair next to her bed and helping her into it. “I’ll try to be back tonight.”

After he is gone, she rubs at the beginning of a headache in her temples, then wheels to the bathroom.

Her shirt has already been discarded, and so the decision to strip the rest of her clothes and run a bath feels like an obvious one. The sweatpants slip over her hips and down her legs easily, but her underwear is more of a challenge since she can’t lift her hips on her own like she used to, nor can she stand to slide them down. It takes almost a full minute, and she almost falls out of her chair, but she gets them and turns the water off with an oddly dissatisfying twist of her fingers. She leaves her glasses on even as they get fogged up with the steam, dropping into the tub.

One of the best feelings in the world to Barbara Gordon is the feeling of warmth enveloping her body as she allows herself to sink into the bath, feeling the soothing burn of the hot water against her skin. For a long time, she just sits in the water, the heat actually pulling her out of her own thoughts for once, something she needs after a night like the one she just suffered through. Eventually, she does fill her hand with soap and begin to run it over her skin, washing away the grime of dried sweat with a sigh of relief as she is finally freed of the discomfort it has been causing her all morning. It almost feels as though she's not just washing away the sweat; she's washing away the memories.

Her hand stops over the sensitive skin of her scar, and her eyes go wide.

Relaxing in the bath had taken her mind away from the events of the morning, for the most part, but touching her scar takes her back, and it feels as if the time for relaxation has come to a screeching halt. In her head, she can hear the screeching of tires on pavement as some con has to pull over so they don't run directly into the Batmobile, can even smell the burnt rubber.

The smell of burnt rubber is replaced by the smell of gunpowder hanging heavy in the air and the sound of brakes screeching against the cracking asphalt of Gotham City streets is replaced with the loud _crack_ of a gunshot and _that laugh._ She doesn't think she'll ever be able to get it out of her head, the way that it starts as a quiet chuckle in the back of his throat and crescendos so quickly into those horrible, high-pitched cackles that haunt her nightmares just like when she was a little kid, echo in her head when she's alone in a dark room left staring blankly at the ceiling and wondering how her life got this way. She hates the way that when someone tells a funny joke she can't even bring herself to laugh anymore because it hurts too much, because laughs just remind her so much of him and the way he just laughed when staring at her naked body on the floor as she was slowly covered in her own blood. She hates the way that she can't smile in pictures anymore because she still can't get the picture of that white face looming over her as he snapped pictures of her when any normal person would have helped and any normal criminal would have fled the scene of the crime out of her head.

By the time she has snapped out of her daze, the water is cold, and she hurriedly drags herself out of the water and wraps a towel around her shivering body, draping one over her legs as she rushes into her dining room, half-eaten slice of cold pizza still sitting on a paper towel next to her laptop. She locks the wheels of her chair as she pulls to a stop in front of what has become her makeshift work station, ignoring the water droplets that are left behind on the keys as she taps away at her keyboard, her brain running on autopilot as she does her best to give Tim advice for not breaking his jaw as he has a punch out at the wedding of the daughter of some bigshot Italian mafioso. Water from her hair drips onto her shoulders but she barely registers it as she blankly stares at the words stretching across the screen.

She shivers when she sends the message, no longer having something to distract her from her thoughts; she wants to call Dick desperately, but knows that police work in Blüdhaven is not something that she can risk distracting him from. If the police in Gotham are barely competent, the BHPD is a bunch of tottering school children with loaded weapons. Dick Grayson is the only cop she knows in The Blüd who is competent enough to actually arrest the big bads as opposed to shoot on sight or let them get away because they're too busy loading their guns to shoot on sight. From what she's heard, Blüdhaven is a city where 90% of the population is criminals and wannabe gangsters, and the other 10% is the corrupt cops letting them go on their merry way. She thinks Dick and Amy might be the only ones in their unit not taking bribes.

So she doesn't call Dick. She stews miserably for a long time in the attempt to make herself feel less useless, and she ends up going through two pots of coffee in her efforts, before she seems to decide that it's not happening. She hasn't noticed how much time has passed until she looks out the window and sees the mid-afternoon traffic as people on lunch breaks go out for coffee and people with morning shifts head home, and in about twenty minutes she will see her father's battered up old beast splutter down that same street as Bullock somehow convinces him to go get coffee at a little 24-hour breakfast joint near midtown. This is one of her favorite things about the Clock Tower; she can look out at the whole city from here, see the growing skyline against the horizon and the construction projects like the expansion of St. Aden’s Orphanage. She likes to go out to the balcony with coffee at sunset.

That’s what she decides to do now; she pours herself yet another cup of coffee and actually heats it up this time, and then she sits on the balcony and leans over the ledge to watch the cars drive past on the streets below her.

The wind that blows her hair reminds her of cold Gotham nights when she still went out in kevlar, and if she closes her eyes and spreads out her arms she can almost imagine that feeling, like she’s flying. Of course, the fabric of her button-up is not kevlar, and she knows that she can’t relive her glory days. Her days as Batgirl are over, no matter how hard she could try to reclaim them, and perhaps that’s for the better. She’s so proud of Cass and Steph, after all this time and all those girls have been through.

Cassandra was treated as a weapon, a tool, by her own father, her childhood sacrificed in favor of training in a way that she’s sure even Bruce would shudder at, with his own child soldiers marching out into the night. She remembers the comms when they first ran into her, the way that Tim had sounded completely dazed when he described the way that she fought. ( _“It’s like she’s dancing,”_ he had breathed, and she’s sure if Steph hadn’t showed up just months later he’d still be taken with her.)

Stephanie was traumatized in a completely different way. She’d heard tales of Stephanie’s nightmares during her pregnancy that her father would try to harm her child just to get to her, which ultimately led to her decision to put the baby up for adoption. The idea that she had to turn in her own father to the police wasn’t exactly heartening, either.

She snaps her eyes open and turns to go back inside. If anyone can help to talk her down, even if the afternoon breeze and warm sunlight on her face helped, it has to be Stephanie. Of course, it’s not her charge’s job to do this for her, to listen to her rambles in the middle of the day or to answer her panicking calls in the middle of the night when she’s probably just gotten to sleep after patrol, to tiptoe around certain topics and carefully filter her words over the comms. She shouldn’t ask so much of the girl, not after everything she’s been through, not when she so frequently offers so little. If she knows anything, though, it’s that Stephanie will always be there for her. She’s much younger than Barbara, much less experienced, but she hasn’t seen any less than Barbara has and there’s something sick about that that she can find an odd sense of comfort in. Maybe it’s the fact that even after everything she’s seen, she’s still so _warm._

She listens to the dial tone intently, as though any second it might change into some important message, and just as she thinks it’s going to go to voicemail she hears a preppy but tired voice over the speaker. “Hello?” There’s a pause for a second, and she imagines the blonde on the other end looking at the caller ID. “Barbara? It’s...” She trails off for a minute, and it seems as though she’s looking at her phone again, checking the time if Barbara is left to guess. She snorts when Stephanie returns, tone flat, saying, “Four in the afternoon. What’s up?”

There’s a grogginess behind her voice that makes Barbara suspect she has interrupted one of Steph’s famous afternoon power naps, which are only beaten in regularity by Steph’s famous afternoon trips to Starbucks. She thinks that between the two of them, Stephanie and Tim must consume enough lattes to power a hydrotechnic facility in the middle of Arizona. “Sorry to wake you, Steph.” She thinks that the waver in her voice is the hint of a laugh. She wants to think so. “I guess I just wanted to catch up.”

“What? No! I wasn’t sleeping, I was...” Just as Barbara thinks she is about to make some excuse about homework or studying, she just sighs and says, “It was a long night, man.” For a second, Barbara thinks that she’s talking about patrol, and a wave of guilt surges through her that she wasn’t there, until she adds, “Midterms are really kicking my ass.” And again, she’s almost laughing. This girl has been Batgirl _and_ Robin, has arrested her own father, but the exams at Gotham U are killing her. Barbara can actually sympathize with this.

“That’s right, you’ve got Professor Lehrer, right? I was never in her class and Dick dropped out before he actually got around to his second semester even though he registered for it, but his roommate was taking her when we first started dating and it was totally brutal. I swear, every time I was in their dorm, if he wasn’t leaving for football practice with the guys, he was writing a paper.” She hears Stephanie snort over the line and hears blankets shifting around, and then Stephanie’s diving into a story about how some girl named Jordanna stole her idea for her thesis.

She zones in and out, but she catches the tail end of Stephanie’s story. “...totally gonna have Tim beat her up for me.” Unlike Barbara, who often gets angry about the insinuation that she needs her boyfriend to protect her, she’s found that Stephanie loves joking about forcing Tim to fight for her honor (and she thinks it has something to do with the fact that Dick would, while Tim is more likely to need the girls to swoop in and defend his pride). They both know that she can handle herself, and on top of that, Cass is way more likely to punch a girl in the face for saying something rude to her.

She spends the next twenty minutes brainstorming with Stephanie about what she can write for her thesis instead, until her computer makes a loud noise with a message from Dinah.

Steph hums over the line as though considering something and says in a tone too warm and soft, “Duty calls?” Barbara imagines the blonde observing her fingernails, imagines her giving flecks of dirt under the free edges scrutinizing glances as she holds the phone to her ear with her shoulder to scrape it from under her nails with her other nails. Actually, the image is rather amusing to Barbara. She never cared much for her appearance, or at least, not as much as most teenage girls she knew, and thus when she was Batgirl, she always kept her nails short so she wouldn’t have to worry about the ever-feared fate of breaking a nail when she was out on patrol.

“Yeah, sorry.” Even as she says it, she doesn’t hang up the phone, and she swears she can actually see the way that Stephanie straightens when she hears Black Canary over Barbara’s comms. They’re considerably on the same level, especially as, technically, Stephanie and Dinah are both direct subordinates to Barbara and thus could be classified as vigilante co-workers, but Steph still has a childish hero worship of the other hero that makes the both of them smile.

Like her earlier call with Bruce, she isn’t greeted by words but with an explosion, and then a Canary Cry that makes her wince, thankfully filtered enough by the comms that she doesn’t burst her eardrum. There's some heavy breathing and the light sound of heels clicking against pavement as Dinah runs, and then a grunt as her friend clearly jumps, and the audio is clear enough that it sounds like she is ducking behind something when she finally speaks. "Hey, owlet."

She rolls her eyes at the nickname. She supposes that it’s an inescapable fate that all of Bruce’s family (even if she isn’t officially adopted like the boys are) must end up as birds. "Hey Tweety Bird. You wanna explain what you're doing in," she pauses for a second to type into her computer, pulling up Dinah's coordinates as fast as Dick could pull up the Dominoes website, "Tokyo, at 2:34 in the afternoon on a Tuesday? As far as I'm aware, you have a gym class to be teaching for another half hour in Star City, and as happy as I'm sure those sophomores are _not_ to see you, it's still your job."

"Aw come on Barbie Doll, don't tell me you forgot about my honeymoon." Dinah's voice might sound sincere to a normal person, and the pout that is definitely on her face might not even look playful, but Barbara can hear the sarcasm dripping from the smug woman over the comm and it makes her grit her teeth.

"You got married _three years ago._ "

She hears a laugh, and then hears Oliver shout something to his wife over his shoulder, followed by another ear-piercing Canary Cry that makes her jerk again. "Well, Oracle, I'll have you know that it's six in the morning here, and some jackass in green decided that Tokyo contained excellent business opportunities, while neglecting to remember the fact that his ex lives here. I just can't imagine why she's not happy to see him." There’s a muffled, 'You married that jackass in green,' and Dinah doesn't argue, but Barbara does hear what sounds like a car exploding.

She focuses on her call with Stephanie for a moment, transferring the call to her earpiece just so she doesn’t have to keep holding the phone with one of her hands when she could make use of it. It’s Stephanie who speaks up in response to Dinah’s statement, with an intrigued, “You’re fighting Shado?” Barbara supposes she shouldn’t be surprised that Steph knows a bit about Oliver’s exes, but she is surprised that she gathered that much just from ‘Tokyo.’

“Aw, don’t tell me you’ve got the kid on here?” Her tone is mostly playful, and so is Steph’s when she responds with, “You’re the one who called, Canary, you can’t be surprised you’re here.” Still, her fingers fly across the keyboard twice as fast with nerves at the banter, and it’s not helped when a minute later there is the distinct sound of metal piercing flesh before Oliver yells.

"Is it possible to ask you to hurry up without coming off as a total bitch?" She wants to say that no, Dinah always sounds like a bitch, but she doesn't have time for the retort as she is already pulling up articles on Takahashi Noriko to find a weakness that they can exploit. Her eyes scan over the pages the minute that they’re translated, looking for anything; a weak knee, a bad back, but she doesn’t find anything like an old injury that hasn’t healed properly.

Translating the documents from Japanese to English takes almost a full minute that they don't really have, but unfortunately for them, she took Latin in high school, not Japanese, so she can't just read it, and she thinks it would probably take longer to translate it mentally anyway. To be honest, she only sort of remembers what she learned in her Latin classes, and she took that for both her junior and senior years. "Oh." The syllable drops from her mouth before she realizes that she is saying it, and she hears the shredding of fabric and a hiss of pain as she imagines Dinah barely dodges an arrow.

Scanning over the document to make sure she has read this correctly, she looks back at Dinah's coordinates and hacks into the nearest traffic camera. It's nearly twenty feet away, but it gives her a visual she didn't previously have.

The first thing that she notices is a tire laying in the middle of the road, which happens to be on fire, surrounded by scraps of metal, with an arrow that she can't identify as either Ollie's or Shado's from this distance embedded in the rubber of another tire a couple feet away that is _not_ on fire. One of the traffic lights has an arrow sticking out of it and is clearly broken, and she wonders what whoever fired it was aiming for, exactly, before she finally sees Oliver ducked behind an ugly silver Sudan whose windshield is broken, loading his bow with an arrow stuck in his arm. She would advise taking it out, but she knows as well as she's sure he does that the arrow is the only thing stopping blood from pouring out of the injury. Dinah, meanwhile, is standing in the middle of a mostly-empty intersection, abandoned cars littering the street around her as she dodges three arrows consecutively being fired at her.

Oliver's aim is weak as he launches, and she's not sure if Shado was going for a kill shot or got his firing arm on purpose, but the arrow goes flying over Shado's shoulder and past her head. Barbara _swears_ she can hear the smug noise of satisfaction that comes from the assassin before the arrow blows up a car five feet behind her, sending her flying into another one that must be at least ten feet in front of her. Her body shatters the rear window upon impact. Dinah's scream shatters the rest. "Okay Canary, I've got a weakness pulled up, but you're not gonna like it." She can see Dinah raise an eyebrow over the camera, as well as see the moment she realizes they're still over the phone.

"Well you've got me interested now, Oracle, you gotta fess up." Her eyes rove over the document again, and she tries to find any other weakness that she can tell the songbird about, but it seems that her health is perfect outside of her current... condition.

With a sigh of resignation, she squints at the video feed as she watches her friend pick up one of the scraps of metal lying in the street and throw it at the other woman as she tries to get up from the car, which she has to jump to the side to avoid. At the same time, Oliver fires another arrow, which nails the enemy in the leg right as she lands on it, and she almost feels sick as she sees the head of the arrow come out of the other side of her leg, clearly having gone through the bone.

"Get this," she starts, conveniently clicking away from the camera feed to switch back to the document. "She went in for a routine check-up on Sunday because she’s been experiencing nausea for the last few weeks, right?" She hears the quiet hum as Dinah nods, which Barbara thinks is a rather stupid move as it reveals she is communicating with someone, but she doesn't comment on this in favor of getting the information out to her ally so she doesn't get an arrow to the chest. "Well her doctor did a blood test to make sure she didn't have an infection of some sort. It ended up coming back positive, but it was for more of a... parasite."

It’s Stephanie who speaks up next. “Oh my god, she’s _pregnant?_ ”

She’s not sure if Dinah would have drawn the conclusion on her own, but she’s still not sure she’s grateful for Steph’s contribution.

She flinches when she sees Dinah over the traffic light, jaw hanging open and eyes (as well as she can see them through the distance and blur of a traffic light in Tokyo) filled with conflict. She looks as though she’s trying to decide if she’s really willing to fight a pregnant woman.

“How far along is she?” It’s a good a question as any, but it still startles Barbara, and her eyes soften a bit when she realizes that, once again, it’s come from Stephanie. While Dinah looks conflicted about the decision, she knows her ward well enough to know that Stephanie would be completely torn apart if she had to make a decision like this, if she had to choose between Tim’s life and fighting a pregnant woman.

“I’m not sure. The file I’m looking at says two, maybe three months?”

“That’s the last time Ollie was in Japan.” Dinah’s finally spoken up, and her voice carries insecurities Barbara hasn’t heard in a very long time.

If she lingers on the thought mentally, she’s very good at hiding it, and Barbara wonders if her body is just acting on instinct when she makes a mad dash for the other woman, throwing a fist toward her stomach. They both grimace at the way she skirts backward, dodging with what is obviously more bewilderment and concern than she was showing before. Her hands fly over her abdomen as though by instinct, and for Dinah’s part, her arrows have stopped flying for the time being. She throws more punches at the woman’s stomach, and she dodges with more and more dedication.

Tactically, Barbara knows how poor a decision these punches are, even if they’re forcing Shado to switch from an offensive to defensive position. She suspects Dinah knows this, too. While she’s forcing Shado to defend herself, she’ll be forced to do the same thing once Shado’s mind reboots and she realizes she can fight back (which shouldn’t take too long, now), and she suspects that this interaction is fueled entirely by anger. Fueled by anger with Ollie, because his ex just so happens to be pregnant and conception just so happens to be estimated as the time period Ollie was last in Japan. Fueled by anger with Shado for all the same reasons. Fueled by anger with herself for letting it happen (though Barbara knows she didn’t _let_ anything happen) and for staying home when she could have gone on that trip. Possibly even fueled by anger with Barbara and Stephanie for telling her, though they both know that this is completely illogical. Barbara doesn’t blame her for being angry, but she doesn’t think she has a right to be illogical.

She only looks away for a second. She goes back to the document to see if there is any way she may be able to ease her friend’s doubts, to see if there is any way she can prove that the timing is off, that the developing fetus _isn’t_ probably Ollie’s. Sure, the estimate fits too perfectly, and sure, Ollie has always had a problem with fidelity, but in her friends’ three years of marriage he’s been doing so well. She only has to look away for a second and then her blood is running cold and her entire body is freezing over. The world seems to fall away for a second as she hears Dinah scream, and then Oliver and Stephanie both yell her name.

Ollie drags himself away from where he was hiding behind a car across the street, and Shado is smart enough to retreat when she sees him coming before she is further assaulted-- before she and the kid she’s carrying are further assaulted. He presses his hands into a growing dark spot at her side, and it looks like an accident on a date night when one simply spills wine on their blouse but it’s so much more sinister and terrifying. There’s two stab wounds there that Barbara can see, rips in the inky black of Dinah’s abdomen that fade into dark, dark red, and Barbara maps it out in her mind until she decides that the wound must be just below her pancreas and stomach. In fact, the proximity of the stab wounds and the organs make it likely that they’ve suffered cuts or tears, and without proper treatment, internal bleeding is possible and even likely. If they wait too long, there’s a very real possibily that she could die, and a couple of stab wounds are no way to go for the legendary Black Canary.

She only snaps back into reality when she sees Ollie pick up the earpiece, tucking it into his ear, and she almost laughs when it nearly falls out of his ear because he hasn't wrapped the cord around his ear and the device itself is just a little bit too small. "Oracle, are you there?" He sounds more panicked than Barbara has ever heard him, and it actively makes her frown.

"I'm already booking a flight back to Star City for tomorrow afternoon, in the meantime I need you to call an ambulance for her so she can get immediate medical attention. Do you speak Japanese?"


	2. Nosocomium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Gotham City, crime is like a moon flower, blooming in the darkness as the moon touches the edges of the city, though the darkness fills every corner of Gotham and leaks from its edges, an ink vial overturned, leaving the moon and its garden as the only light. Star City is a place where crime blooms during the day, the sunlight giving its petals a brighter hue as soft breezes make them dance through crowds of people, so inconspicuous yet still impossible to miss.
> 
> * * *
> 
> **This chapter contains light gore and minor character death. Reader discretion is advised. The author will post a synopsis in the comments section.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> nosocomium  
> n. hospital

She pays for her flight to Star City.

Bruce offers, of course, he always offers. He’s a gentleman, and he’s also her friend, and he’s _also_ incredibly rich, so it only makes sense that he offers. Dick offers to go with her, makes a point of her anxiety surrounding hospitals and saying that he doesn’t want her to have to deal with it alone, but she suspects that he’s really just worried about her. She, however, makes a point of saying no; for one, because she doesn’t want him hovering, doesn’t like the implication that she’s incapable, but for two, because she thinks that if she goes alone, maybe it will help somehow.

She does offer Stephanie the opportunity to come with her. When she says she can’t afford it, Barbara offers to pay for her ticket, says that she was ridiculous if she thought that Barbara had ever meant anything else, and Stephanie’s response is that she’s obviously touched, but still has to say no because of stupid midterms. Stephanie drives her to the airport anyway, saying she doesn’t have her first exam for another few hours and she was going stir crazy just sitting in an empty house while her mom was at work.

She expects Dick along for the ride. He has to work, thanks to the development in the case, but promises to pick her up from the airport when she flies in on Monday and call her when she lands in five hours.

Hugging Steph before she departs, she promises that she’ll take her to Star City someday and she’ll make sure that Dinah and Oliver give them a tour (or at least Dinah, since realistically, Oliver is busier than anyone would expect him to be with Queen Consolidated). In return, she just gets a laugh and a suspiciously tearful goodbye and then she is beginning the boarding process for a disabled person. There’s an elderly couple boarding with her, and the tiny woman appears to be both blind and deaf as her husband guides her around on his arm, tracing little patterns on her skin in a way she finds very sweet.

Five hours go by surprisingly quickly, especially considering she doesn’t fall asleep, intermittently staring out the window and skimming the pages of her book.

The day that she leaves is a Thursday. She’s planned to spend the whole weekend in the city, entirely on her own dollar, and maybe it’s stupid because she, unlike her boyfriend and unlike his father and unlike her best friend’s husband, is not incredibly rich. She’s the one who paid for her plane ticket just like she’s the one who paid for the distinctly middle-ranked hotel over the internet and she’s the one who pays for every cup of overpriced, iced black coffee at the café on the corner down the block from her hotel. She spends the first day bouncing between her hotel and aforementioned café, until eventually just settling into a corner of the café sipping on too much coffee and leeching off of their free WiFi until she feels the caffeine crash wash over her before she has time to order another, and she returns to her hotel to pass out at six in the evening.

Friday, the second day, she leaves the hotel with the full intention of going to see Dinah at the hospital, but finds she can only make it halfway there before her stomach and gut threaten to rebel, lurching and strangling her in one awful and mutinous process. She hides in the room for the rest of the day, calling whoever she can and talking as long as she can in an anxious rambling act that could give Tim a run for his money (and does, when no one else is available so she dials his number and hopes he’s not studying).

Anxiety stirs in her gut on Saturday as she tries again. It feels like the city filled with waves of smiling people is mocking her, and one of the downsides to her line of work is that the sunlight gives her a constant squint that makes her feel like she looks ten years older. In Gotham City, crime is like a moon flower, blooming in the darkness, though the darkness fills every corner of Gotham and leaks from its edges, an ink vial overturned, leaving the moon and its garden as the only light. Star City is a place where crime blooms during the day, the sunlight giving its petals a brighter hue as soft breezes make them dance through crowds of people, so inconspicuous yet still impossible to miss. People scoff and mutter half-apologies as they bump into her while she wheels down the sidewalk and one man shouts a string of swears at her when she almost runs over his foot because he wouldn't move. Her eyebrow twitches, but she is forced not to do anything; she has to maintain her persona as Barbara Gordon, mostly ordinary, the poor crippled girl who works at the library through the computer. No one in Star City knows who she is. No one is allowed to.

Dinah is checked into the Star City Medical Center, a large hospital near Avalon Park, and Barbara's dread grows the closer she gets to the building. Hospitals have been difficult for Barbara since that night. If it were anyone else, she wouldn't even bother going.

Her fingernails drum against the arm of her chair with soft tapping noises that do little to calm her nerves as she waits at the last crosswalk before she reaches the hospital; the hills in this neighborhood force her to keep the brakes on her wheels so she doesn't slowly roll backward, but the slight angle she is at due to the mound allows her a better angle to anxiously scan her eyes over the fourth floor of the building, roving over the windows as if she may be able to find Dinah's and gain some of her hardiness. She is pulled back into the real world with a blink as the light turns green and one of the cars next to her honks loudly at the probably-drunk driver in front of them. Removing the breaks from her wheels almost takes more muscle than she has, though she knows this is because she is shaking and is only a semblance of her true strength.

She can barely breathe as the elevator takes her up to the fourth floor. If the nurse at the desk notices how pale and sweaty Barbara is, she doesn't say anything, instead offering to push her wheelchair to Mrs. Lance's room. Barbara stubbornly turns her down, but her shoulders protest the decision as she pushes her way to room 442 and have a hard time forgiving her as she raises an arm to knock on the door. It creaks a bit as it swings open (she imagines this is because it wasn't properly closed in the first place) and she takes this as a sign she can enter. Her presence is announced by the soft _click_ of the door closing behind her, but Dinah doesn’t seem to notice as she stares out the window as though she has lost something in the glass. She should be in bed, resting, but Barbara remembers her last extended stay in a hospital and if she was able, she would have spent her time standing at the window and staring into space, too.

She wheels up to the window herself, peering through the glass until her eyes settle on a group of boys who can’t be older than 13, playing what looks to be some modified version of football.

She sees stoicism etched into every line of Dinah’s face, painting an eerie reflection of Bruce on her friend’s features. A nervous half-smile makes its way onto Barbara’s, but she’s sure Dinah would see through it if she wasn’t so _lost._ Her eyes are locked onto one boy in particular, who looks a couple of years older than the rest, like he might be an upperclassmen at their school who has been assigned to watch a younger team.

She can just make out his expression from the distance, see the small smile that plays across his lips as he watches the younger boys, and it reminds her of Dick when they would train with Jason and Tim. His hair is bleached blonde, but looks like it might be naturally light, anyway, despite the distinct darkness to his skin. A grey hoodie for one of the local high schools (she can’t make out the faded letters, but she suspects she wouldn’t know what school it is, anyway) mostly covers a green t-shirt, but it is loose enough at the collar that she can see the article underneath. His subtle pride from before fades into a smug grin when one of the other boys slips on the grass in a move that also reminds Barbara of Jay in the early days, and he’s laughing as he offers the scowling kid a hand up. He has a very big-brotherly demeanor that makes Barbara nostalgic, and she has to tear her eyes away from him to look back at Dinah, who, to her credit, seems to have snapped out of her entranced state. She is still staring at the kids, but there’s a struggle in her eyes now, like she’s trying to figure out what to say. Barbara considers breaking the silence for her when she suddenly says, “That’s one of my students. Connor Hawke.”

She doesn’t need to look where Dinah is pointing to know who she is talking about, and though she is tempted to say something, she just stays quiet to let Dinah speak. “He’s such a bright kid, you know? He’s one of those kids who has _so much potential,_ and we can all see it, but he doesn’t apply himself. It was so weird to find that out, too. He’s always babbling on about English Lit or Chemistry when he comes into my class...” Barbara’s mind flashes to Tim. He easily aced all of his tests, referred to every subject as an “easy A” in a way that would have made her feel indignant at his age. She was smart, but she’d still had to _work._ Tim was just as much a prodigy as she was, and despite all of his talk of how easy tests were, of how he needed a challenge, he’d dropped out. No matter how much she understood the decision, she was endlessly disappointed.

As she is about to ask about him, Dinah rips her eyes away from the glass, away from the kids beyond the glass, to look Barbara in the face. “He gets in fights. I mean, it makes sense. He’s always competing with the other boys in my class like he’s got something to prove. I thought it was just some dumb alpha male complex that seems to prevail in all teenage boys, not... _Whatever_ it actually is,” she accompanies the statement with a vague gesture in front of her, as though trying to pluck the appropriate term out of the air. “His mom is looking to transfer him out this year; put him in some private program I’ve never heard of. She wanted to ask me for a recommendation for a scholarship.”

“Did you write it?” She’s surprisingly sucked in, leaning forward in her chair.

She sniffs, and Barbara only just notices how wet her eyes are before she moves to sit on the edge of her hospital bed. “Of course I did. Like I said, he’s a bright kid. He deserves to go to whatever school can actually accommodate his needs.” Privately, Barbara thinks that kids like that don’t always get those kinds of opportunities. She wonders if Tim would have finished high school if Bruce had been able to enroll him in a gifted program. Then again, she supposes it was never a lack of ability that prevented Bruce from enrolling Tim in a program like that so much as Tim’s lack of displayed interest in the idea, as though such a thing was still beneath him. She’s getting absurdly emotional now, too, so she quickly makes to change the subject.

“How did you and Ollie explain the injury?” Her voice is only a little shaky, and is gentler than she would have expected. She thinks of Bruce’s stories, which always seem so ridiculous to her, though that may be because she’s in the loop. Just a few weeks ago, Bruce was telling one of the few reporters in Gotham that Barbara doesn’t recognize that he’d had some skiing accident to explain a broken rib he’d actually received in a fist fight with Killer Croc, and she has to wonder how willing the reporters in their city are to sweep the fact that he was clearly in Gotham only three days earlier under the rug in favor of interviewing him about the Alpines.

“Ollie has a friend.” Her tone is clipped, short and hurt, and Barbara almost flinches.

“A friend?” She prompts, voice light. She thinks of Dr. Thompkins, of how lucky they are that she happened to be Bruce’s psychologist when he was younger. Stephanie has certainly learned basic first aid after living in Crime Alley with a nurse for a mom and a villain for a dad, but Barbara doesn’t think she has the stomach to do all of the stitches the boys need by herself, not to mention her own injuries after a typical night out.

She has to bite back unwarranted anger when Dinah just repeats, “A friend,” as though she doesn’t know what Barbara is asking or why she is asking it. It doesn’t take much sleuthing, or any at all, really, to tell that she’s upset about something.

She even has an idea as to what that something may be. “Are you worried?” Dinah gives her a confused look and she rushes to clarify, “About Shado. And Ollie. About whether it’s... I mean, about if he...”

“No.” She hears a finality behind it, and she almost wonders which one of them she’s trying to convince. “I trust my husband. Maybe I’m an idiot for it, but I trust that Ollie wouldn’t... That he didn’t...” She trails off for a second and her face is back to the stony expression she wore before as she tries to figure out what she wants to say. “I don’t lie to myself. One of the reasons I was hesitant to marry Ollie-- one of the many, _many_ reasons,” there’s a note of amusement there that Barbara latches on to, “is because I was sure that being monogamous like that would always be a struggle for him. I always sort of suspected that it would happen some day, but... I don’t think that it’s happened yet. Or maybe it did, but it was a long time ago, it just wasn’t... Not this time. Oliver is a real playboy, unlike Bruce, but he’s not a liar. He would have told me, even if it was only because he knows I’d find out eventually anyway.” She supposes that’s something she can believe. Ollie isn’t stupid, and he’d have to be to think that women don’t always find out about those things like a stupid plot contrivance in the second act of an even more stupid romantic comedy, especially women like Dinah. “The timing has to be a coincidence.” _It’s final,_ is what she doesn’t say, but Barbara still hears it there, lingering.

She doesn’t have time to respond before she hears gunshots ring through the air outside, sees the brownish tones of blood on grass from Connor Hawke’s shoulder when she whips her head around to the window and sees the younger kids lying on the ground, disoriented and annoyed but still _alive._ Her breath hitches in her throat as her eyes flick frantically over the scene like it’s one of the fights with the Birds or with one of the kids-- there _is_ a kid out there, and he’s hurt and he’s bleeding but she’s stuck up here. After a minute, she settles on a tall figure in a mask, clutching a gun that she can’t see too clearly from this distance even with her glasses on and making his way from the edge of the park to the boys. She works on burning details into her brain because if she’s going to be stuck up here now then she’s going to do _something_ about this as soon as she possibly can, and that means she needs to analyze everything. The figure is obviously male, and a closer look places him around six foot, even if she can’t get a good enough estimate without some frame of reference, a person she knows standing nearby or a monument she knows trivia about looming off to the side. He seems to be looking for something, or straining to hear something, tilting his head subtly enough in each direction that an untrained eye might not catch it, but she’s been training for this since she was seventeen. Whatever he’s looking for, it doesn’t seem to be there, because he starts walking again and for all that she aches to do something-- what little she possibly _can_ do-- she’s frozen.

Her muscles only spring back to life when he starts walking toward the boys, crushing something on the ground that glints ( _glasses,_ she decides, thinking to the way it caught the light like both metal and glass) under his foot. He leans down and grabs one of the boys under his chin, tilting his head up to look at him. Connor is yelling loudly enough that she can hear him, but she can’t quite make out what he’s saying, and she wishes he’d stop because if he was quiet for a moment maybe she would be able to focus on the subtle movements of the man’s lips under his mask. (She wouldn’t, and she knows that, but she wishes, _oh, she wishes_ that she might be able to rather than sitting on the fourth floor of a hospital doing nothing.) Whatever he said, either the boy’s response was unsatisfactory, or it didn’t matter anyway, because he aims his gun at his head and pulls the trigger, black hair and lightly tanned skin all exploding into a mess of red and black ooze.

She lets her hands fly to her wheels, her brain working on autopilot, and grits her teeth through wet cheeks and stinging eyes as she pushes herself to the door of Dinah’s hospital room, hardly noticing that its occupant is moving with her. Two nurses rush past her at the door, headed for the elevator, but the woman at the desk must see the two of them because she approaches, cautious yet frantic in one movement. “Both of you need to stay in this room. Mrs. Lance, you especially need to get some rest; what are you doing out of bed?” If she’s actually looking for an answer, she must quickly forget about that, pushing Barbara’s chair back by the armrests and shooting her an apologetic smile before closing the door as though hoping that might slow them down (because really, she can’t be thinking that they’ll stay put). She hears a lot of sounds come from the elevator: screams. Gunshots. Yelling in a man’s voice that she’s heard but can’t pinpoint. Did he just say “bang” out loud?

She throws the door open just in time to hear another gunshot, another “bang,” and to get blood on her face from the same blonde nurse who just tried to convince her to stay in the room for her safety. Her stomach heaves, and it takes everything she has not to throw up on her legs. She turns and gags over the arm of her chair, but only feels bile in the back of her throat before there’s a heavy, metallic _clunk_ against the back of her head, accompanied by her assailant saying “bam” in what she is beginning to suspect is a compulsion. The world around her spins and rings as she hits the floor, her chair rolling back into the room with the force of her body falling forward.

Blood is trickling down her neck. Out of everything happening around her, that’s what her mind focuses on. She hears the grunts of a fight, gunshots and Canary Cries ring in her ears, hisses and cries of pain meet her, in her bleary vision she can see bare feet and combat boots moving around on the ground like dance partners, but what she pulls from the situation is the small trail of blood. It starts at the nape of her neck, warm and thick, reminding her of blankets and bedtime stories. By the time it’s reached the base of her neck, it’s beginning to cool and congeal. It’s cold and viscous when it reaches the spot between her shoulderblades, but she’s too busy floating away to shiver or even notice.

There’s a throbbing pain in her hand, but she’s too far gone; a ringing in her ears, but she’s almost drifted off. She hears Dinah calling her from somewhere distant, but she can’t make out what she’s saying. Everything is too muddled, as though she is a child again and has pulled a blanket over her head to hide from the rest of the world. Her eyes fall closed, but she’s still conscious for long enough to realize that the gunshots have stopped. _Dinah beat him,_ she thinks fondly, cheek pressed into the cool tile. Vaguely, she wonders if her cheeks are flushing, due to the high contrast in temperature between her face and the floor, but she also remembers how cold all hospitals seem to feel; then, proudly, she realizes that she doesn’t feel anxious at all right now. She’s almost unconscious on the tile of the fourth floor of a hospital, far away from her home and most of the people that she loves, but she feels lighter than air. (Maybe that’s just the blood loss talking...)

* * *

_All she can see is those yellowing teeth surrounded by those lips, and she's never been sure if they're painted red or if they just naturally look that way like every other horrifying feature of the clown's face. She can count them, thirty-two awful teeth that look like they should belong to at the very least a coffee addict, but she'd be surprised if he did anything adult like drink coffee or smoke cigarettes with how childish he acts all of the time. He wants to be a child. She wishes he were a child._

_But on the other hand, she doesn't. She is glad that he is an adult because an adult can be caught and punished and an adult can be put on trial, executed, sent to therapy to get better, not excused of his crimes because he's obviously too young to know what he was doing. He is the one who ruined her life and she cannot wait until they catch him and ruin his, and she wants to be there in the front row when he's finally put on trial for all of his crimes rather than just thrown into a mental institution as if he hasn't surpassed simple "lunatic" at this point. She doubts a sicko like him can ever really get better, especially when he manipulates his psychiatrists into partners in crime and tears families apart for no reason other than he wants a laugh._

_She can't look around. She wants to, but no matter how she turns all she sees is that same grin; she can't get it out of her head or her line of vision and a small part of her hopes she really does die here just so that his ghost will stop haunting her. How can a man who isn't even dead be a ghost? How can one person affect another so profoundly that even if he were to die, he would live on in her head forever, mocking her?_

_She shudders and sobs, though she chokes on her own sobs and ends up gagging bile onto her legs which burns. The burning spreads, and it focuses on her gut in a way that makes her organs twist (she's not sure that's a metaphor)._

_Finally, she is able to rip her eyes away from that grin, only to see herself, her legs and stomach covered in her blood, that laugh echoing all around despite the source nowhere to be found and it makes her sick, though she doesn't throw up this time. She feels like she's wasting away. Colleen never found her and she's still stuck laying on that floor, her legs and back being cut with large, sharp shards of glass from the coffee table which only shattered as she went crashing back onto it, her skin stained red bright as her hair with blood and shame from being bested by that clown of all people. This isn't how she planned to go. This isn't what she wanted._

_She never signed up for this._ Only she did.

She blinks her eyes open slowly, hesitantly, and has to squint at the familiar surroundings, her heart still in her throat, skin slick with sweat and eyelashes glued together with tears, but she's alive; her heart pounding in her chest is evidence enough of that.

The first thing she notices is white. The color almost makes her sick, as though she was inhaling fumes from bleach, bleach that stains with the color and _strangles._ She struggles to push herself up, but can only let out a cry when her hand meets the mattress and pain radiates through her whole arm in waves. She has tumbled off the shore and into the ocean and she is drowning.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she registers two things: Her hand is broken. She has had broken bones so many times that she should be used to it, but the pain still wrenches her gut and pinches at the backs of her eyes with the familiar pinpricks of tears, makes her feel sick to her stomach. Her whole body lurches and she only just has time to turn and throw up into a bin that conveniently rests at the side of a bed that is not her own, a pair of hands sweetly holding her hair back for her.

That brings her to the second realization: She is in a hospital room. The white, the sickening white that filled her vision, is the crisp, clean walls of a hospital room, and other colors filter in now that she’s looking for them.

There’s flashes of other colors across the TV, some movie show or skit she doesn’t recognize playing on mute. There are small flecks of imperfections in the paint, and a simple painting of a flower vase in earthtones hangs on the wall by a door that hangs open. If she was awake earlier, it would have been closed; open doors always drive her crazy.

As though a trigger has been pulled in her mind, everything rushes back to her. Laying on a cold floor with blood spilling from the back of her head. The feeling of floating away as her best friend shook her and yelled things in her ears even if she couldn’t understand her, hearing her as though she was a mile away or shouting to her through a tunnel. The squeak of wheels as her chair rolled away from her. A man she almost recognized shouting “bam” as he smashed a gun into the back of her head. The blood of a blonde nurse who had committed no crimes other than trying to protect her patient hitting her face as she opened the door to Dinah’s hospital room. Gunshots in a hallway through a closed door marking the deaths of nurses who were willing to sacrifice their lives for the sick (making them much better men than any of the hospital staffs in Gotham). Helplessness as she watched a boy only a little older than Damian-- a boy who looked _just like him_ \-- take a bullet through the head. Imagining the _crunch_ of glasses under a heavy boot. Seeing all of those boys on the ground in Avalon Park, breathing, and thinking of how close they were to losing that ability. Their savior laying on the grass, bleeding out from his shoulder only a few feet away from them-- She chokes, eyes going wide as she looks around the room before settling on Dinah, who seems to be in the middle of a fight with Dick.

“Connor?” Her voice is raspy, rougher than it should be, and her throat feels raw. She thinks back again to the attack on the hospital, the attack on Avalon Park, and in the back of her mind she hears screaming. Her screaming. She realizes that she wasn’t just floating away, even if she thought she was. That she was screaming. That no one stays completely quiet when the bones in their hands get broken from the force of being stepped on by a combat boot, or maybe it was worrying about Dinah as she fought with a man Barbara didn’t recognize. Maybe it was seeing that boy die.

“He’ll be fine,” Dinah breathes, her face softening when she processes Barbara’s voice. “Physically, anyway.”

She coughs when she feels something heavy and _hard_ smash into her ribs, but she’s too weak to defend herself so she is defenseless to the attack. She processes blonde hair after a moment and wraps her arm around Stephanie’s skinny frame.

She hears heavy breaths and sniffs and realizes that she’s been crying. (Barbara doesn’t blame her. In her head, she switches their roles. Stephanie has flown out to Star City alone after offering to let Barbara come with her, and Barbara has declined, staying in Gotham City and studying. She is certainly blaming herself right now. Barbara can’t scold her because she knows she would blame herself, too. So she just wraps strong arms around her and shushes her in a way she hopes is comforting.)

Running her fingers through long hair, they both ignore when they get snagged on tangles in favor of focusing on the little comforts. Barbara doesn’t even process half of what she whispers to Stephanie, but the girl is loosening her grip slightly so she can only assume that it is working. Stephanie murmurs something that she doesn’t understand into her shirt and finally lets go.

She takes a deep breath and runs her eyes over the other girl: She’s still wearing her pajamas, as though she hopped on a plane without thinking and hasn’t had time to change yet, and she’s not sure if her eyes are puffy because she’s been crying or because she clearly hasn’t slept in at least 24 hours.

Fear and confusion have cleared, and she’s checked on Stephanie, so the only thing she can do is look around the rest of the room and analyze her situation. She’s in a Star City hospital room, almost identical in appearance to Dinah’s, except the curtains are drawn shut and it’s so _crowded._ Mentally, she does a roll call. Stephanie has only just let her go, and still lingers by the bed, toeing nervously at the floor. Dick and Dinah are back to their argument, and from the snippets she catches she thinks it is about who gets to hug her next. Bruce lingers in a corner with a relieved expression, and Damian is next to him trying not to look like he cares too much. In the opposite corner, Tim is perched in a chair, thumb frozen over one of the buttons on the remote, and Jason stands next to him with his mouth hanging open as though he was mid-cocky remark before she woke up. Cassandra lingers by the doorway, probably having noticed just how many people there are in this room, as well, and feeling very overwhelmed. She’s never liked social situations where there were more people than she could keep her eyes on, and while a selfish part of Barbara wants to see her, she settles on dismissing Cass once she feels confident in her voice again. (Maybe she’ll wait a minute, though... just a minute.) Clark is pacing in her peripheral vision, in the hallway and passing by the doorway every few seconds, making a different but distinctly worried face every time. In chairs when he’s not blocking her view, she can see Ollie and Hal waiting, Oliver with his face buried in his hands and Hal looking uncomfortable. "This feels like the beginning of a joke..." She coughs out, her throat sore. “Bruce Wayne, all of his kids, and half of the Justice League walk into a hospital...”

She thinks she even hears Bruce cough out a laugh, though she's sure the only reason he's not lecturing her about secret identities right now is because he doesn't think she's lucid. (If she had two good hands, she would show him who’s lucid.) “In true Gordon fashion, though, I seem to have forgotten the punchline...” Jason snorts from the corner, Dick tries to bury his own laughs in his hand, and Damian at least looks more relieved than he was before, seeming to think that her bad joke will have drawn everyone else’s attention for a minute. Her eyebrows furrow as she thinks on the joke though, looking around the room to confirm a suspicion. “Where’s my dad?” She looks directly at Bruce when she asks, her expression more pointed than it probably needs to be. (She only realizes now how bad her eyesight is. It doesn’t take much effort to confirm her glasses aren’t on her face.) The room is quiet again, but it’s not the awkward silence that comes before bad news.

“His flight hasn’t landed yet. The doctors said they didn’t expect you to wake up for at least another day. Your dad was planning to be here in an hour.” Though she was asking Bruce, it’s Dick that answers her, his argument with Dinah apparently ending as he scoops her up in a tight hug. She buries her face in his shoulder and tries to soak up all of the affection and warmth in the gesture.

Unlike her hug with Stephanie, her exchange with Dick is entirely silent. He pulls away enough to share a look with her, and she recognizes the apology in his eyes just like he recognizes the sharp look in hers. It’s easy to blame yourself when someone you love is in pain, and she’s sure that he’s struggling with the fact that he could have _been there._ She’d said no, but he could have insisted. She tries to hammer it in, even if it’s silent, that she wouldn’t have let him. That it’s not his fault.

She gets a hug from everyone. Bruce lingers a second longer than he has to, but lets go faster than either Dick or Stephanie. Tim’s is brief and loose, but still has that same warmth that everyone else’s has. Like Tim, Jason’s is brief, but it’s tight enough that she couldn’t doubt he was worried about her if she was trying to. Dinah lifts her from the mattress and mutters into her ear about how god damn worried she’d been. Cass’ hug is briefer than Tim’s or Jason’s, and she’s gone the moment Barbara tells her she can go, which signals the men in the waiting room to come in. Even Damian hugs her for a second, recoiling as though he’s been burned when she ruffles his hair afterward.

She feels varying degrees of awkward when the rest of the group hugs her. Clark practically crushes her, and she wonders if he didn’t break one of her ribs; it’s warm, but she feels like it is warmer than she can understand from him. It’s the sort of embrace one expects from family, and it’s not that she doesn’t like him, she’s just never thought of him as family. Hal and Ollie both hug her like a step-father might hug his step-daughter who has just begun to wear training bras, which is to say, awkwardly and like they can’t wait to get out of the arrangement.

She thinks she hears Ollie mutter an apology into her hair before he lets go, but before she can ask about it, Bruce speaks up. “After the attack on Avalon Park, the Star City Police Department apprehended Onomatopoeia. He’s currently in custody.” She nods and watches him closely, waiting for the ‘but.’ “Clark and Hal were here to assist me and Oliver in looking into his reasons for attacking the hospital.” _Also,_ she privately adds, _Clark was obviously worried about me._ “From what we can tell, he wasn’t here to explicitly attack anyone, but rather to deliver a message.” His face grows darker, fading from Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy, to Batman. His eyebrows are furrowed together and he exchanges a look with the other two men before continuing, “A message for you.”


	3. Strigiformes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has to think about that for a minute. _How am I feeling?_ She feels guilty, for watching Gilbert Shepherd die from the fourth floor of this very same hospital yesterday. She feels sick, with the memory of that nurse’s blood on her face even if someone must have washed it away when she was unconscious. She feels useless, like she could be doing something to fix all of this if she were already back home with her computers. She knows she can’t say any of this, though, so she just looks at the woman with a smile just as fake as hers and says, “There's this old Irish proverb that my Uncle Roger used to say a lot when I was a kid: Like shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Strigiformes  
> n. an order of birds of prey that comprises the owls and is usually divided into the families Tytonidae and Strigidae.

“A message,” she replies, tone too flat to be a question. Her head is spinning with the new information and she almost feels like her hand is throbbing with more than just the broken bones; with the need to rip the remote out of Tim’s hand and switch to the news. Bruce nods grimly in what she assumes to be an affirmative even when there was no question asked, and she gives the group around her an incredulous look, as though, as a whole, they’d all proposed the theory. “Okay. Message delivered.”

She isn’t sure what the message is. She doesn’t know whether this is supposed to be a warning for what will or only may come, or if there is something specific the attack was supposed to convey to her, but she can’t say with complete honesty that she knows what all or any of this means.

She doesn’t get to ask. Dick looks between her and Bruce, and then, slowly, at the rest of the people around them, as though something hangs in the air that’s just out of his reach. “What, that’s it?” As though he doesn’t think they’ll understand what he means, he continues, “Why is one of Star City’s wackos leaving a message for Barbara? How did he even know that she was here? I mean, doesn’t it make more sense for that message, whatever it is, to be for Dinah?”

“Not really, no.” Her eyes shift to Clark while Dick’s head snaps impatiently in that direction. “Onomatopoeia wouldn’t go after Dinah, even if we’re working off of the assumption that he knows her secret identity.”

“He only goes after non-powered vigilantes,” Ollie elaborates, taking a step further into the light from the mostly dimmed area by the door. “He wouldn’t go after the Black Canary, or her civilian identity. The only theory that would explain something like that is if he learned Green Arrow’s civilian identity, and chose to go after my wife, but he’s not methodical like the villains in Gotham City who all get their PhDs before they start their criminal careers. It would have been easier to go after me in my office, and he would have known that, doubly so if he figured out how dangerous Dinah is.”

“We considered the possibility that someone else might have been going after Oliver at the same time, so additional security was hired to monitor Queen Consolidated for the next twenty-four hours,” Bruce adds, arms crossed again and playboy persona fading away to nothingness now that they are behind closed doors, even if the door is just the one to her hospital room. “Alfred is monitoring the security cameras back in the cave, but neither he nor the officers at Queen Consolidated have spotted anything out of the ordinary since the attack on Avalon Park nearly fourteen hours ago. If he is working with a partner, they probably left the city after Onomatopoeia’s arrest. J’onn is looking into purchases of plane tickets on flights out of the city and cross-referencing it with criminal databases across the country. In the meantime, I looked into the transaction history on Onomatopoeia’s personal bank account. An anonymous payment was made to one Ron Tacitus for $1,000 Thursday evening, so--”

“So, you think he was paid off,” she finishes, her nose crinkling. “I suppose it makes sense. If his typical target is non-powered vigilantes and we have no reason to believe that he’s trying to get to Oliver, then going after Dinah in the hospital is off the table. He wouldn’t be going after the civilians, either, unless one of them also happened to be a vigilante, but he specifically came to room 442. Dinah’s room. This, coupled with the fact that Dinah’s husband happens to be one of the powerless vigilantes, for lack of a better term, that he is constantly fighting, leads us to the conclusion that this is all a passive assault on Green Arrow. Except, for that, he would have to discover his secret identity first, and it would be much easier to attack him personally, as opposed to attacking his decidedly superpowered wife.”

She knows that she’s pulling a face. She’s deep in thought, and she knows very well the way her eyes crinkle up and she starts chewing her lip when she’s thinking particularly hard about something because Dick has made it a point to tell her how cute it is. She’s only seen the expression on her father, when he’s unofficially brought a case home with him and he stews in the evidence until he can figure something out. She’s never thought it was cute when it was him. “Then, we consider the other theory: That he’s leaving a message for me. The evidence lines up. We have no reason to believe that he’s discovered who Ollie is, but he was very plainly attacking the hospital for a reason, and I doubt it was a coincidence that he went to the room Dinah was in-- the room I was visiting. You said the payment was made on Thursday evening? That’s the day I landed in Star City.”

“But most people think that Oracle is just a computer program,” Dick points out, and that gives her pause.

She’s been very careful. Her computer is nearly untraceable, as has been tested by Bruce and half of the rest of the Justice League as a safety precaution, and if it is traced, she has programmed multiple fail safes so all of her data, personal and professional, deletes itself before the bug manages to copy any of it. All of the back-ups she needs are in her own head, and any files deleted by the trace can be copied over from the Bat Cave’s computer system if she somehow forgets something important. Anything she deems too personal is either immediately and manually deleted, or thoroughly locked away.

She’s dragged back into the conversation when Bruce says, “We traced the anonymous payment to an account under the name Kadhabat Bariya.”

“An innocent lie,” Damian mutters, and everyone turns to look at him. Barbara had forgotten he was here, and she smiles softly at the way he straightens under everyone’s attention, even seeming a bit embarrassed (like a normal kid his age might) before he adds, “Tt. Mother used to say it when we would do activities Grandfather would not approve of behind his back, such as eating chocolate or playing word games. It is Arabic.”

“I didn’t think you’d ever done anything like that, to be honest,” Jason says, shrugging as though commenting on a movie while exiting the theatre. “The thought that you might have had a somewhat normal childhood never really occurred to me.”

Before they have an opportunity to begin fighting, she cuts in, “Two people died right in front of me during that attack, and more out of sight. Assuming that Onomatopoeia _was_ paid off to commit the attack on Avalon Park, whoever Kadhabat Bariya is, their lie is far from innocent.”

Silence hangs heavy in the air, not the strangling force that it so often is or the comforting blanket that she wishes she had, but simply a weight pressing down on them, like gravity has shifted just slightly to apply more force on her hospital room. She chews nervously on her lip and watches the images that flicker across the screen, almost letting out a bitter laugh when she realizes it’s a crime show.

She jumps when the door slams into the wall with the force of being shoved open, craning her neck to see who has just entered her room. She’s startled for a moment by the strong arms that wrap around her before she gets a proper image, and then she’s hit with the familiar smell of a smoke-stained coat and cologne that’s been worn sparsely since it was purchased in the late 80s for a date that resulted in a marriage, two kids, and a subsequent rocky divorce. Wrapping her good arm around the warm figure, everything in her relaxes and she buries her face in his neck. “Dad...”

* * *

“Tacitus isn’t talking,” Hal announces his presence with an update on the interview with Onomatopoeia, who hasn’t done anything but speak his namesake when police get particularly frustrated and slam their fists on the table or smack him, in the case of more morally ambiguous police officers. (And, she’s heard, a particularly frustrated Bruce in costume, when he and Clark were trying to get information out of him.) She’s surprisingly pleased by this, as Dick refuses to tell her anything about it and Bruce only gives her vague half-answers. He’s followed by Dinah and Ollie, who both look distinctly displeased. “Well, he’s not saying anything useful, anyway.”

She deflates a little, but shoots him a look she hopes is encouraging even if it’s not quite a smile. “Thanks for the update, Hal.” She mutes the news in the background, which has played past any segments covering the Avalon Park incident, anyway, even as the line underneath the reporters still reads ‘Six dead in attack on Avalon Park and Star City Medical Center.’ The name Gilbert Shepard has been echoing through her head since they announced the boy who was killed yesterday, and she sees his parents’ devastated faces every time she closes her eyes after the interview with them aired an hour ago. The 24 hour news channel has been playing since everyone left her room and the remote was pressed into her hand by a tired Tim, and it’s been both a blessing and a curse. “Has anything come up on his wife and children yet? Channel 9 isn’t interviewing them until 7:00, but last time Bruce and Clark were here they said they’d look into them as potential leads and send someone with an update.”

“No dice,” Dinah says, taking a seat at the foot of her hospital bed. “Anne Tacitus was at work at the time of the incident, and Clark’s interview with her didn’t leave us with any reason to believe that she knew what her husband was planning at Avalon Park. Daughter was at debate club and son was at a friend’s for the weekend, wasn’t supposed to come home until Monday before his arrest was on the news.”

“Where’s your father?” Oliver sits in a chair in the corner of the room with his hands folded in his lap and a curious look crossing over his features. She leans back against the pillows and focuses her eyes on the TV as the subline changes to “Oliver Queen’s wife Dinah Lance supposedly spotted fighting with the perpetrator of Avalon Park attack, witnesses say.”

She turns the TV to low volume as she answers, remote resting on her good side afterward. “Coffee run. He left just before you got here, actually. He should be back soon, if you were looking to talk to him about something.”

She doesn’t get an answer from them, so she just shifts her focus to the report on the TV. _“One of the nurses on duty at the Star City Medical Center on the day of the attack, Valentine Norris, says that as he was laying on the floor, Mrs. Lance came out of her room and started defending the unnamed redhead who was visiting her. Mr. Norris has been kind enough to join us today after being discharged from the hospital for his injuries. Mr. Norris?”_

 _“Hello Yente, it’s nice to be here tonight! Especially since it means I’m not in the hospital anymore.”_ They both laugh for a minute, and then launch into questions, which the brown-haired man on screen answers with an uncomfortable expression. _“Yeah, I saw Mrs. Lance. I was her nurse for the day shift, so I’d recognize her anywhere. Still wearing her hospital gown, she sees this woman lying on the floor and just goes nuts! It really makes you think twice about all of those times the paparazzi said she was cheating on Oliver after they found out about all of her trips to Gotham City last year. Like, imagine if she’d lost her temper with those guys.”_ They laugh again, and then it’s oddly quiet for a minute, and Mr. Norris looks like he’s trying to decide whether or not he wants to say something. _“To be honest, the way she moved kinda reminded me of the Black Cana--”_

The screen turns off with a click, and she shoots a bewildered look at Dinah. “You don’t need to be watching the news 24/7. I know you work with Batman, but come on; you’re still too young to be obsessed with this stuff. Plus, it sounds like they’re just gonna dive into speculation and unsupported gossip.” Barbara almost wants to smile. Everyone in this room knows that Dinah is Black Canary, so the idea that she’s referring to it as simple speculation and unsupported gossip, like it’s some wild rumor and not the complete truth, is vaguely amusing to her. “We have more important things to look into. For example,” she starts, straightening her back and setting her shoulders, “why would Onomatopoeia attack a group of kids at the park that you didn’t know to leave a message for you, when you might not even see it?”

“I would have seen it. He knew I was in the city, and it seems he knows who I am, so he knows I would have seen it. Whether it was in person, or on the news, or he somehow _made_ me, I just would have.” She has a theory, and if she were still able to get up and walk, this would be the point where she began pacing around the room, hand cupping her chin in thought. “Maybe I didn’t know those boys, but I’m starting to put together why that was the group he attacked. I mean, if you think about it, that was really the perfect group, and one has to wonder if he followed them there, or if it was just a perfect coincidence.”

After a minute, Hal speaks up. “Are you going to share or do we have to guess?”

She snaps her attention back to the people around her and nods.

“Right. The oldest kid in that group was Connor Hawke, who’s sixteen. The other two survivors were both thirteen. Albert Shepherd just filled out the papers to skip a grade, and plans to start his freshman year at Meadowhill next month, while the other boy, Azubuike Ihejirika, is a foreign exchange student at his middle school who will be starting his eighth grade year at the end of this summer. The last boy, the one who was shot in the head, was Gilbert Shepherd, younger brother of Albert Shepherd. He was eleven years old, and that’s his connection to me.”

She looks around, and realizes how confused the group around her looks. “Eleven.” At her insistence, it doesn’t clear anything up, and she buries her face in her hands with a groan. “December 19, 2004, Damian Wayne is born somewhere in the Middle East at one of the many bases Ra’s al Ghul and his daughter Talia have built up around the one of the Lazarus Pits in the world. November 18, 2014, Talia leaves her not-quite ten-year-old son with his father in Gotham City. _It’s so obvious._ Damian is eleven.”

“He targeted the kid because he’s the same age as Damian?” Ollie’s face is a picture of anger, but Dinah’s voice is calm. It’s a surprising role reversal from what Barbara expects, but it’s not completely mindblowing.

“That’s what I suspect. It goes further than that, too.” She turns the TV on again, rewinding as much as she can until a picture of Gilbert Shepherd illuminates the room, and then pausing. “Unlike his brother, who has brown hair and eyes, Gilbert Shepherd has black hair and green eyes-- _had._ ”

“He’s got a summer tan, too,” Hal observes, leaning in to the screen and stroking his stubble thoughtfully. He doesn’t correct his use of the present tense, and the thoughtlessness makes Barbara flinch. “So he goes to the park to deliver this message, and he sees a group of kids playing football in the park. He sees one who’s about Damian’s size, he’s got the same hair and eyes, and he thinks, _Eh, I’ll just pick this one off. Really hammer it in._ So what’s it all mean? What’s the message?”

She doesn’t hesitate to answer, “It’s a threat. Damian, no matter how much of a brat he can be sometimes, is my family, and the message that they’re trying to deliver is that they’re going to go after the people I care about-- they’re going to go after my family. What I don’t know is if--” She’s cut off when the door is nudged open and her father enters the room, coffees in hand, followed by a short Asian woman with a sleek bob.

He looks around at everyone, and her sentence finishes itself in her head. _What I don’t know is if there was a condition I’m not seeing._

“Hi.” He starts, sounding almost startled. “If I’d have known that everyone was going to be in here I would have got more coffee.”

“They’re leaving,” says the woman behind him, giving Dinah, Hal, and Oliver a pointed look as though they’re students and she’s a very aggravated seventh grade teacher until the men nod and get up to leave the room. Dinah lingers a second after them, giving Barbara a final, bone-crushing hug and muttering in her ear to call if she needs anything, and then she takes her leave, following after her husband and his best friend. The room is quiet a minute longer while her dad passes her the iced coffee that’s slowly becoming something of a regular for her, and then he’s being ushered out after everyone else as though he hasn’t been privy to her medical information her entire life. The doctor looks over something on her clipboard for a second, and then she’s looking at Barbara with a smile that doesn’t meet her eyes. “Hi, Miss Gordon. I’m your doctor, Dr. Ting, we met last night after you woke up. How are you feeling?”

She has to think about that for a minute. _How am I feeling?_ She feels guilty, for watching Gilbert Shepherd die from the fourth floor of this very same hospital yesterday. She feels sick, with the memory of that nurse’s blood on her face even if someone must have washed it away when she was unconscious. She feels useless, like she could be doing something to fix all of this if she were already back home with her computers. She knows she can’t say any of this, though, so she just looks at the woman with a smile just as fake as hers and says, “There's this old Irish proverb that my Uncle Roger used to say a lot when I was a kid: Like shit.”

Her tone is flat and impatient, and she only looks at Dr. Ting over the rims of her glasses.

She has an air of half-expectancy and impatience to her. There’s an unspoken question hanging in the air: _How long until I can be released?_ She wants to get on the soonest possible flight to Gotham and back to the Clocktower, with her computers and her sad little coffeemaker and the revolving door of an asylum for the criminally insane. Being in Gotham City won’t make her feel any safer than being in Star City does, but it will put her back in her realm of expertise, and that’s the most she can ask for. She realizes too late that Dr. Ting is talking, and snaps her attention back to her face.

“...this afternoon. I know that you’ll want to be back home as soon as you can, so check with your regular doctor in Gotham tomorrow, and then schedule a check-up on the bones in your hand for next week. I’m going to write you a prescription for codeine, but you’ll probably only need over-the-counter pain relievers like ibuprofen. Don’t engage in too much strenuous activity with that hand, like typing or using chopsticks. I understand you spend a lot of your time on the computer?” She nods, but the gesture is unsure, as though she’s testing unfamiliar waters. “Make sure you take breaks every hour or so, for about fifteen to twenty minutes at a time. If you take proper care of your injury, your hand should make a full recovery in three to four weeks.”

Dr. Ting makes a few final notes on her clipboard and then shoots Barbara a last smile, which does, at least, look a bit more real. “Barbara,” she says, and her tone resembles that of someone who might have known her for a long time, which catches her attention more than her name actually does. “Feel better soon.” The minute she’s out of the room, her father is rushing in, asking about the interaction and only pausing from his interrogation to take sips of coffee, which does, at least, succeed at making her smile. They entertain each other alone for almost an hour before there’s a quiet knock on her door. When she announces that it’s alright to come in, Stephanie shuffles in holding a “Get well soon” card, followed by Cass and Tim, with a bouquet of daisies and a brightly wrapped box respectively.

Her father has to step back to avoid Stephanie throwing herself at Barbara again, but it’s less panicked than last night and more like the typical bright greetings that Barbara is used to receiving. She lifts her good hand to run her fingers through Steph’s hair for a minute, before patting her back as she pulls away from the embrace. It’s only a moment before she’s shoving all of the gifts toward her, and chattering, “Here! The flowers are from Cass. I know that lilies are your favorite but I guess daisies are better for get well soon gifts?”

“Prettier, too,” Cass mumbles, staring off at one of the white walls.

“The box is from Tim. He said he’s had it for a couple weeks now, but he didn’t bring it with him last night for obvious reasons.”

She looks at it, and feels a small bout of nervousness at the challenge posed by opening it with half of her fingers broken. Instead, she focuses her efforts on the card, which she determines must be from Steph via process of elimination. There's glitter on the front that comes off on Barbara's fingers when she picks it up, more reminiscent of a Hallmark birthday card than anything resembling a get well soon card, but the dumb cartoon cat with a cast on one of its legs is goofy enough that she can see why Steph would purchase it.

Upon opening it, she is actually relatively surprised to see it is mostly blank, except for the signature more befitting of a high school student than a girl going on twenty, the clearly-a-rich-boy signature of Tim, and the large, rough scrawl of Cass.

"Sorry I only got you a card, my mom wasn't too happy when I dragged her to the store at two in the morning before hopping on a plane across the country with no explanation.” They both wince. She’s sure that they’ll both be hearing about that one later.

“No, it’s great. Thank you, Stephanie.” She carefully puts it down on the end table at the side of her bed, and replaces the already-wilting orchids in a vase with Cass’ daisies, and then settles her eyes on Tim’s gift. The wrapping paper looks as though it’s professionally done, a useless skill that she knows all of Bruce’s kids have picked up for reasons that haven’t actually been disclosed to her. It’s green, as opposed to the same red with white snowflakes she’s used to from Tim, and she looks at him as though asking for a hint.

If he catches on to the implicit question, he doesn’t answer, instead taking the box from her hands and undoing the wrapping as carefully as he had probably done it. He opens a little black box and stares at it for a moment before turning it so she can see its contents. It is exceedingly simple in a way that she finds she likes more than she would anything extravagant, though elaborate enough that it feels like Tim must have put a lot of effort into finding it. A small golden pendant of an owl hangs from a chain, with light carvings on the surface that seem meant to replicate feathers and two small, dull black gems where eyes should be that give the piece more life than one would expect.

She brushes her thumb over the pendant with a smile.

“I saw it a couple weeks ago and I thought of you... Owls are considered to be symbols of Athena. It was thought that she only fought for just causes, and never without a purpose.”

Her father snorts from his place by her bedside. “A necklace like that? You’re really giving Grayson a run for his money, Tim.” The sentiment behind it that her father doesn’t understand is the one that means more to her. The Athenian mythology, the symbol of a goddess of wisdom and military victory, doesn’t go over her head, but beyond being a symbol of Athena, an owl is a bird of prey. Not only that, an owl is a bird of prey who prefers to operate at night; in the dark and away from prying eyes. “You’re a real lucky girl, Ms. Brown,” Dad says, and it effectively snaps her out of her own thoughts.

“I am, Commissioner, but Timmy doesn’t actually buy me pretty jewelry.” She shoots him a look that Barbara knows is playful, but Tim still holds his hands up in defense, wearing an expression that’s half-fake guilt and half-real guilt that tells her Stephanie will probably be receiving an expensive gift that she’ll guilt herself about soon. She looks at Barbara for a minute and then sighs. “I wish we could have hung out longer, but you should probably get some rest. Broken bones don't just heal themselves, and speaking of bones, I should probably jump this boy's while he's still in town.” She throws a hand over her shoulder to point her thumb at Tim, who has the decency to flush at the joke, and then they’re leaving her alone in the room with her dad and she’s dozing off more easily than she expected.

* * *

It’s nearly one in the morning when she lands in Gotham. Her father has been holding her good hand the entire plane ride, and weaves her chair through the airport expertly until they find Dick. “Nice necklace,” he mumbles into her ear when she leans up and wraps her arms around him, and he holds her as though he didn’t just see her in the hospital last night, wasn’t just holding her hair back while she threw up and speculating the meaning of Onomatopoeia’s attack with her and the rest of the family.

She can tell that her dad is reluctant to leave her, but she can also see the worry lines etched into his face, even more pronounced than they usually are, so she tells him to go home and get some sleep. The argument is a short one, mostly because they’re both ready to get into a soft bed and sleep. Dick offers to drive her to the pharmacy before dropping her off at the Clocktower, but she mumbles with her cheek against the cool glass of the window that she’ll go tomorrow, and that right now, she just wants to go to bed. They don’t talk during the drive to her place. They don’t talk until he’s helping her into her chair and kissing her forehead and mumbling a goodbye into her hair. “Are you sure you’re gonna be okay?” The _on your own_ is unspoken, and she appreciates it. This is the first time she’ll be alone since the attack-- since before the attack-- and though she understands Dick’s concern, understands everyone’s concern, the constant presence of other people is growing suffocating. She doesn’t answer him out loud, burying her face in his shoulder and nodding her answer. They aren’t hugging, but the proximity is still a comfort.

She lets go after a minute. Some of Dick’s visible worry has been chased away, but she still has to squeeze his shoulder one last time and press a tired kiss to his cheek before she leaves him there, glancing at him over her shoulder one last time before she pushes the door to the Clocktower open. She doesn’t hear him driving away outside until she’s already at the elevator.

The elevator is creaky, and doesn’t play music like most of the buildings in Gotham. She thinks it makes sense. The Gotham Clocktower is an older building, installed by the Wayne family shortly after the city was first founded and renovated sparingly since then, mostly in the last few years since she became Oracle.

She drums the fingers on her good hand against the armrest of her chair, humming a tune she doesn’t fully remember as the elevator drags itself up more slowly than any of the sleek, new buildings she had grown used to in Star City and Wayne Enterprises. It doesn’t help that she lives on the top floor, which is nearly a dozen stories above the ground. Her arrival on her floor is announced by a ding, and she resists the urge to scratch at her broken hand by fumbling with the keys in her pocket, wheeling herself toward her door with more effort than she is used to. The small bones in her hand and wrist don’t hurt as much anymore, which she’s sure is partially due to the fact that she took a large dose of ibuprofen before settling into her seat on the plane, but the itch seemingly won’t go away and she drags her nails over the cast just to occupy herself. She sits in front of the door for a second. It feels like a big step to push herself through it, and she just stares for a second.

She fumbles with the keys for another second, holding them in her bad hand in the hope that it may help the healing process somehow. She mutters to herself as she turns the key in the lock, then pushes the door open.

She’s vaguely aware of the sound of glass shattering.

The shards of what was her vase are on the floor around her, a pool of water spreading from its remains and the daisies that filled it looking sad.

With all of her security measures, she's amazed anyone could break into her home. She has automated weaponry and security cameras that feed directly into the Batcave when she’s gone, so whoever got in had to be very stealthy. It’s amazing that none of her failsafes caught it, and the fact that they could do all of this without getting caught before they were finished means someone was smart enough to know how to get past everything, and it makes her shudder to think about. She feels nauseous at the sight, her jaw hanging open like a ridiculous cartoon character, and her good hand curls up into a fist on the arm of her chair; it's not in anger, but she can't even begin to identify what it is she's really feeling. She feels like it should be shock, she wants it to be anger, but she thinks it most closely resembles fear. The more she thinks about it, it's a genuine terror that fills her to think that someone had the time, and, more terribly, the motivation to do this to her. She's trembling, and though she wants it to be with rage, is almost tempted to tell herself that it's with rage just so that she doesn't feel so useless, she knows that really, she's horrified. Her heart is in her throat and she wants to scream or cry but it almost feels like sound is beyond her at this point, like she has transcended the need to speak and gone straight into a total meltdown. She feels crazy enough to be locked up in Arkham looking at the scene around her. The walls of her living room are covered in playing cards; she would think it were just a regular prank by some kid if it weren't for both the fact they surpassed her security measures, and all four of the walls are only covered in one face. Her home is wallpapered with Jokers.


	4. Consectary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She picks up the phone and holds it to her ear, still sniffing and coughing up the occasional sob. The dial tone that rings in her ear is surprisingly soothing, and she imagines that it’s because it gives her something solid, something real to focus on outside of what’s going on in her living room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> consectary  
> n. deduction; conclusion or corollary; consequent

She cradles her face in shaking hands, one itching and filled with broken bones, the other wet with tears and snot as she coughs and chokes on sobs that she tries to bury in her palms. It’s not so much that someone has broken into her home and vandalized the place, it’s not that she’s been surrounded by at least a hundred familiar predatory grins even if they aren’t that exact face, and it’s not that she has to deal with it alone due to her own dismissal of her boyfriend only minutes ago. Inherently, the biggest issue is the sense of violation that permeates the entire experience. She can deal with the B&E and the mockery of the cards that surround her, and she can deal with that alone, but what she can’t deal with is the knowledge that someone was here; in her home, without her consent.

It should be impossible. She’s weaponized the whole building with security cameras and facial recognition and failsafes upon failsafes, with automatic weapons and lasers and flares, so no one should be able to get in. Now, she has to reset all of that. She has to deal with the violation of the experience while knowing that somewhere, _she_ must have made a mistake that let them get through. On some level, this is her fault.

She sniffs as she drops her hand into her lap, warm, wet palm resting against the cool plastic exterior of her cell phone. She knows that she should call Bruce or Dick, let them do the detective work so she isn’t bombarded with questions she hasn’t prepared answers for.

She picks up the phone and holds it to her ear, still sniffing and coughing up the occasional sob. The dial tone that rings in her ear is surprisingly soothing, and she imagines that it’s because it gives her something solid, something _real_ to focus on outside of what’s going on in her living room. “Hello?” She straightens at the voice, but when she opens her mouth no sound makes it out. There’s a brief pause and then, “Barbara?” She stiffens at her name for some reason, and then she’s back to crying, sobbing into the receiver of her phone and feeling too much like a child to tell the person on the other end what happened. “I’ll be over soon, sweetheart.” She realizes this is exactly what she wants. The voice on the other end of the line is strong and warm, and she wants her dad. She sniffs and nods though he can’t see her and he hangs up as though he might have.

* * *

Her condo is filled with police officers. Rookies that she doesn't recognize snapping pictures of the walls, experienced cops that she does scribbling down notes in the corner, a pair of idiots talking just loudly enough that she can hear them making obvious statements about how many decks of cards this must have taken. One of them presents that it must be at least a hundred, while the other comments that it’s probably more than that. She buries her face in her hands and groans into her palms, rubbing at her temples a minute after that to stave off a headache that’s forming in the front of her skull while the idiots walk out the door to talk to someone.

Flashes from cameras reflect off the shards of glass and puddle of water on the floor outside of her door, and it catches her attention long enough that Montoya manages to sneak up on her. “Hey.” She jumps as she turns to look at her, her eyes scanning over the officer as though she might be a threat. Renee stands across from her in her uniform as opposed to the sweaters and jeans that she’s used to seeing her in when she comes to family gatherings on Kate’s arm, the warmth in her brown eyes smothered by concern and the typically smooth edges of her face wrinkled with worry. A pen and a notepad are tucked haphazardly into the pocket of her slacks, and the cap is chewed straight to hell; Barbara has heard Kate complain about this particular habit of Renee’s, and the corners of her mouth lift slightly as she finally meets the other woman’s eyes. “How are you holding up?” She sounds exhausted, which doesn’t surprise Barbara as it’s barely two in the morning and she’s been holed up here with the rest of the officers for nearly an hour now.

She sighs, about as tired as the rest of them. Her bad hand itches again, but she still drums her fingers against the armrest absentmindedly while she thinks: How is she holding up? She’s already been questioned by three other police officers, so she’s _tired,_ but none of them have asked how she was feeling. They didn’t care about that. Where was she while this was done? Does she know why someone might want to break in and prank her? The answers to their questions have felt like they were trying to strangle her since the first time a blond-haired man with coffee-stained teeth talked to her.

“Not even a week ago I was in the hospital after being attacked by some bad guy in a mask in Star City. Now I’m home, and I’m being attacked here, too.”

“You must be tired. I know I would be.” Renee offers, her smile not quite reaching her eyes. Quieter, she says, “Kate has a lot of visitors while we’re gone, but... _Dios joder,_ no one this dedicated, ya know?” Unfortunately, she does know. The laughing faces around the room won’t let her forget, mocking her with their grins and jester’s hats in reds and yellows and blues, and all she sees when she looks away and closes her eyes is a yellow grin.

She answers a few questions for Renee, who taps the pen cap against her lip while she thinks between statements, before she finally returns to the warmth of their typical conversations. “I love you like a daughter, girlie. You know that, right?”

She nods, and Montoya squeezes one of her shoulders before she goes to scold the officers still debating how many decks must be up on her walls now. Her eyes rove over them, catching on every face and every pin in the wall. There must be hundreds around her, hundreds of pairs of eyes staring her down where she sits by the door, and she chooses to shift her focus to just how many little holes will be left behind when they finally take the jokers down. She’ll have to repaint the walls lest the hundreds of tiny cavities drive her as crazy as the grinning faces depicted around her. Maybe they aren’t _his_ face, but they’re close enough that staring at any one of them too long still makes her stomach twist up and her chest feel hollow. She shivers as her eyes drop into her lap.

The police officers stay in her home for the next two hours, periodically questioning her or asking if she’s okay as if her answer might have changed between now and the last time they asked her five minutes ago. What particularly jars her, though, is when an officer approaches her as everyone is clearing out, tall and looking particularly unbothered. He’s not one that she recognizes, and the way that he smirks condescendingly down at her makes her want to shudder and look away if not for her own stubbornness. “1,011 jokers. Whoever’s pranking you was real dedicated,” he offers with a sly expression, then follows Montoya out the door.

One of the few comforts she’s had is analyzing her environment, paying attention the officers who were working. It’s jarring because he wasn’t one of the officers counting the cards.

“Are you okay, sweetheart?” She realizes her mouth is agape when her dad rests a hand on her shoulder, and she turns to face him with a fake smile that she hopes is reassuring. Clearly, it falls flat, as he only gives her a more concerned expression, though there’s now a distinct note of skepticism to the look, and she lets her face fall into a more resigned look as she looks toward the empty, still-open doorway.

“Who was that officer?” She says, getting straight to the point. If her hypothesis is correct, she’s sure that he’s new, and her father looks taken aback for a moment, like he might have expected anything but that question.

“The one who spoke to you at the door?” He asks, and she nods. His eyebrows furrow again for a moment and his hand comes to his chin in the thoughtful expression she knows they share. “I’m... not sure. I don’t recognize him.”

This, she thinks, is even more conclusive than if the officer had been given a name to match the face. Her father is getting old, she knows, but his memory is still strong and he’s always made it a point to know the name and face of every officer who serves under him, even before he was the commissioner. If he doesn’t recognize the man then, more so than it would if he had simply been a new officer, it means that he must have been planted, likely by whoever has been trying to get to her. _If I can find his identity I might get my first real clue..._

She doesn’t get much of an opportunity to continue this train of thought as Bruce and Dick enter her home without notice or apology through the still-wide-open door, both in costume, Bruce looking immediately introspective while Dick is fuming. He approaches her immediately, glass crunching under his feet as he takes heavy steps through the puddle and smattering of glass by the entrance. “Evening, commissioner,” Bruce says coolly, just as Dick opens his mouth like he’s about to go on a full blown rant. Suddenly, he seems to realize that they aren’t alone, and stalks away to sulk in the corner while investigating what damage has actually be done to her domicile. She would find it kind of endearing if she didn’t also find it incredibly childish, and so she focuses her attention on her father and Bruce, who now appear to be having a quiet conversation amongst themselves. This ends up leaving her just as annoyed, but this she can handle at the moment so she wheels closer to them, a difficult task with the cast on her hand, but not impossible.

“Batman,” she says, as though this should convey her train of thought perfectly. Bruce looks sideways at her for a minute, contemplative, and she knows that she’s making a face. “What are you doing here?” She didn’t call him, something she expected to get scolded for. Clearly, he and Dick knew that something was up with her and she didn’t let them know, based on the way Dick entered already angry and is now sulking in the corner of her living room, but she is left wondering how. She wouldn’t put it past Bruce to have somehow found out through one of his many resources, but she can’t think of a reason he would have brought Dick with him.

Her father, as though reading her thoughts beyond the ones she voiced out loud, explains, “I called him.” Then, as though he’s worried this answer alone will get him in trouble, supplies, “After I called Dick. It’s strange that the two of you got here before he did when he’s the one who dropped her off from the airport. Can’t have gotten that far.” She hears Dick mutter something from where he has taken a seat on her couch that sounds like ‘What a mystery,’ and she shoots him a scowl. Quietly, her dad and Bruce exchange the last of what she realizes now was information on what happened, and then her father presses a kiss into her forehead. “Are you going to be okay if I go?”

She snorts. “I’m not a little kid anymore, dad,” she says, as though she wasn’t crying for him mere hours ago. With that, he leaves, finally closing the door behind him.

Immediately, she shoots Bruce an expectant look.

“We checked Arkham’s security database before we left. Everyone’s still where they’re supposed to be.” She’s still tightly wound, giving him an intense look, and he grows firmer as he adds, “The Joker is still securely in their custody. They have full surveillance on his room, just in case.”

Relaxing, she lets out a sigh. “One of the officers here was a plant. Stopped to talk to me on the way out and told me there were 1,011 cards plastered up here.”

“Does that number mean anything to you?” Bruce asks, brows furrowed beneath the cowl.

She thinks for a moment. “Well, I can tell you what it _doesn’t_ mean. It’s not a multiple of two or a number with any square root, which means that it’s not one of Harvey’s goons.” She sighs, holding up one finger. “And that’s it, that the conclusive evidence I have. I can’t think of any significance to the number 1,011...” She pauses a moment. “Ten eleven,” she says aloud, marvelling at the number. Bruce gives her a confused look, as though he’s not quite sure what she’s getting at, which she thinks is fair. “Do you remember in 1997 when you saved my baby brother? I was seven, you were in your first months as Batman, and it’s what ultimately led to my dad approving of you despite the blatant vigilantism.” He nods, maintaining his unsure expression. “James’ birthday is October 11th.”

Dick picks up on her train of thought. “You think that whoever is trying to get to you is threatening your little brother?” She nods. Considering the threat that’s already been given to someone else’s little brother, she wouldn’t be surprised. Damian is important to her, of course, and she would hurt anyone who hurt him just as quickly as she would anyone who attacked James; more so, even, considering that one of them is eleven while the other is almost twenty. He’s not enough to this person, then. “He should be safe in Arkham, though.”

“Unless whoever’s doing this is in Arkham,” Bruce says, once more catching Barbara’s thought process. The Joker is still in Arkham, she knows, and she wonders if this isn’t an abridged sequel to his one bad day plot that resulted in the loss of her legs just to torture her.

“So, what’s the threat?” Dick asks, and she has to think about that for a moment before it smacks her in the face.

She’s surprised the _World’s Greatest Detective_ didn’t figure it out before she did, but then, she supposes she’s always been better with computers than him. “Kadhabat Bariya. 1011 is the second half of the binary code for the letter K.” They don’t point out that this means they would be using the 1011 part twice, because it’s the best conclusion that they can bet on. “The first half is 0100.”

“One hundred hours.”


	5. Baryphonic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It's just difficult sometimes." He seems to struggle for a moment to find the words. "Knowing... To know, that you're sending children to their deaths."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> baryphonic  
> v. having trouble speaking

_She’s laughing. It’s the first thing she notices, and she can’t remember a joke being told, but she still can’t stop the cackles that erupt from her chest, holding a hand over her mouth as though stifling it slightly might help. She’s not sure why she actually needs to. Looking around, she sees a few familiar sights: There’s a tree with an old tire swing hanging from it that neither she nor James ever actually played in after 1999 when he fell out of the thing and broke his arm smacking it against the old holly. The little garden she started in 2004 after a project in her science class which her brother promptly made it his mission to destroy; she notices the coral bells are flourishing. An old busted up bike that James didn’t actually ride after he turned eleven, at which point he decided that walking everywhere suited his needs fine (which she’s sure is totally coincidental with the fact that he crashed in front of a girl he’d liked on the way home from school and scraped up his face on 14th Street). In front of her is the familiar door to her childhood home, firmly shut, and she can imagine opening it to be greeted with the smell of Dad’s cigarettes and the sight of James sprawled out on his stomach on the couch, struggling with elementary math homework. She used to love doing their homework together, while he always complained that it made him feel dumb._

_She knocks. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just reach into her pocket and pull out her key from where she’s sure it will be resting next to a tube of non-flavored chapstick, but she stands patiently in front of the door as she waits for it to swing open._

_A full minute passes before it opens, and in her head she can picture James, calling for her to answer it from where he’ll be laying on the couch and reading some weird book like_ Helter Skelter _or_ In Cold Blood _which she could never make it through. He’d always been so fascinated by books about serial killers and their methodology, she probably should have been concerned. She never was. Having forgotten that she isn’t home, he’ll eventually get up and drag his feet all the way to the door, knowing full well their father will be too busy with one of his quirky scrapbooks to answer it himself. The door cracks for a moment, and she sees one of his round lenses over a skeptical blue eye. Then, he opens the door all of the way, and she laughs again, but it twists her guts and makes her chest feel oddly tight. She stares in horror at her hand as she lifts a gun. She levels it with his stomach. She pulls the trigger._

She's got goosebumps when she wakes up, and she's freezing despite the comforter and silk sheets, so cold that she can almost feel the icicles her toes have turned into as her teeth chatter and her stomach churns. She doesn’t feel as frantic as she often does when awoken by a nightmare, and stares around the room with owlish eyes. Everything is blurry until she finally grabs her glasses and puts them on, dragging herself into her chair as she decides that she’s not going to get back to sleep tonight.

Navigating the halls is only made more difficult by her broken hand and the fact that she is not at home. The halls of Wayne Manor are labyrinthine, and it oft seems to her that the staircases shift around a la _Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone_.

The decision to stay at Wayne Manor was both a particularly easy and particularly difficult one. Logically, she knew that she wasn’t safe staying in her Clocktower now that the defenses had been breached, but she was still reluctant to leave. Explaining her decision to stay at the manor as opposed to staying with her father in her childhood home, as had been initially offered, or staying with Dick in Blüdhaven was surprisingly easy. “Wayne Manor has some of the best security in Gotham City,” she had said, and to hammer in her point had passive aggressively added, “and I wouldn’t want to make you have police surveillance of the house.”

“It’s definitely got better security than my apartment,” Dick had offered, as though he was trying to compromise. There is also, of course, the added benefit of the Batcave, the advanced computer of which will help more than hinder her career as Oracle, as opposed to the old single-desktop setup she had operated with during her first months with the identity at her father’s house. Now, though, as a childish sense of anxiety washes over her at the beginning of a long, dark hall, she wonders if she made the right decision. Her hands stutter over her wheels for a moment as though she is six again and trying to convince herself not to ask her father to check for the monster under the bed _one more time_ , even though he has already checked twice. She quickly overcomes the hesitant moment of paranoia, but as she wheels herself into the kitchen, she continues to feel foreign, staring the expensive espresso machine down as though it is threatening her life.

She squints at the machine with a tired, hazy sense of frustration. There are at least half a dozen buttons on the thing, many of them unlabelled, and she has to wonder if this thing came with a manual, once, or guests were left to rely on Bruce and Tim’s knowledge of the thing to get it to work.

She flips a switch that she thinks is supposed to turn the machine on, but instead of doing that, it seems to make the whole thing whir disapprovingly at her before turning off. She glares at the machine like it might feel her anger at its insensitivity and decide to cooperate.

“Having a fight with the coffee machine, Miss Gordon?”

She jumps, whipping around in a fighting stance and throwing the nearest object at the intruder. Alfred catches the ceramic mug with a startled expression, and she supposes they should both be grateful that it’s empty. After a minute, she relaxes, rubbing her good hand over her face. “You’ve still got it, Alfred,” she says, and without even looking knows that he’s nodding. “I’m sorry. I’m... on edge.” She doesn’t know how better to describe it, and is less sure of what’s bothering her so much. When she finally lifts her face from her hand, she sees that he’s wearing pajamas that might better suit someone Damian’s age; striped, satin pants and a matching button up shirt that remind her of something she would have been excited to receive at the age of nine. _They’re the least wrinkled pajamas I’ve ever seen, that’s for damn sure,_ she thinks fondly.

“It’s quite alright. I didn’t mean to startle you, Miss Gordon. I suppose you couldn't figure out Master Bruce's coffee machine?" With a flushed face, she nods and shamefully pushes her way to the table in time with his movement to take over preparing coffee. He flips the same switch that she did and the machine makes a noise like a groan of protest, as though it is asking for five more minutes. Squinting at the machine in a similar vein to her, only looking more like he is trying to intimidate into working, he clears his throat and turns to her, straightening out non-existent folds in the material of his shirt. “Tea, then?”

She snorts, and it's surprisingly easy, then nods at him with a smile. "Excellent."

The teapot he picks up from one of the many cabinets around the room looks like it is more expensive than the coffee machine back in her own kitchen is, white porcelain with carefully etched veins of deep navy blue. He wordlessly fills it with water and puts it on the gas stove to boil, standing over it as though it might start screaming that it is ready any minute. “If I might ask,” he starts, giving her a gentle look that she thinks is the expressive manifestation of a light nudge of the elbow, “what are you doing awake at such an hour?”

“I had a nightmare,” she admits, sure that Alfred would see through any lie she might try to tell were she tempted to do so. She doesn’t elaborate, though, and she’s thankful that he doesn’t ask her to.

After a minute, he says, “A common ailment, then.” She knows without asking that he’s referring to himself, and she shoots him a sympathetic smile. He is, without a doubt, the strongest person that she knows. At the same time, he is still a person.

They remain in comfortable silence while the tea brews. Ace comes into the room while it’s still steeping, sitting loyally at Alfred’s side as though politely begging for the tea bags. Once it’s done, the three of them sit at the table, still in the dark, Barbara sitting across from Alfred in her chair, marvelling at how expensive the teacup in her hands must have been, and Ace laying on the floor underneath the table at the old butler’s feet.

He doesn’t pry like she might expect Bruce or Dick to. He doesn’t try to subtly bring up the topic of her dream or assertively tell her that she’s going to talk about it as though she doesn’t really have a choice in the matter, doesn’t use guilt as a weapon to manipulate her into talking to him. He simply sits patiently across from her, watching her as though waiting for her to decide that she’s ready. It’s a different approach to the subject from what she might be used to, but she’s grateful for it. Alfred has always been the easiest member of the family to talk to; not because he was more likeable than any other member, though there were circumstances where she wouldn’t argue that, but because he was so gentle. Caring.

She breaks first. “I haven’t thought so much about James since we were little kids... It’s kind of funny, actually. It seems like a lot of the time, nobody’s thinking about him. Do you ever get that feeling?” She looks at him expectantly, and then stares at the surface of the table before she can get any sort of answer. “Nobody ever thinks about him because he’s in Arkham, but he’s not a real threat like a lot of the inmates there. He’s never broken out. He’s never killed anybody. He’s there more for being a danger to himself than to anybody else... By all rights, he’s not a bad person. But everyone just chooses to forget about him.”

She feels a shiver run up her spine, and she takes a long drink of her tea. “He’s only Tim’s age,” she admits after a minute, squeezing her eyes tightly shut. “Can you imagine that? Only being Tim’s age and being locked up in there with people like Poison Ivy and Killer Croc and... _him?_ ”

“Master Timothy is an adult,” he reminds her, though his tone seems skeptical. He cracks shortly. “I would hate for him to be placed in a similar situation.” She spends a horrifying moment imagining Tim being locked up in Arkham. Bruce and Dick have both undergone their own undercover missions to the place, to gather evidence on corrupt doctors or freely interrogate inmates, but Tim is only nineteen, and the idea of someone that young being exposed to what she knows to be such a horrible institution makes her sick. The idea of someone that young like her brother.

“Am I a bad person,” she starts, “for wanting to break him out?”

“Not at all,” he assures her immediately, and she relaxes a fraction. There are plenty of times and plenty of people where assurances that she is a good person do nothing to console her conscience. When Alfred says it, there’s something about it that makes her eerily giddy, like getting a compliment from a sweet grandfather who doesn’t hesitate to dole them out but still has a sincerity behind each one. She wonders if this is what it feels like to everyone else to receive praise from the stoic Bruce Wayne. “When loved ones are in danger, it can be difficult to restrain oneself from rushing in to rescue them from a bad situation.” He says it with far too much knowing in his eyes. She imagines situations in Bruce’s first year where the parent in Alfred urges him to save him, but the soldier in him forces him to stay at a distance. She thinks it’s heartbreaking.

They're back to silence. He sits with a straight back, holding his cup with his little finger sticking out, which is for some reason she has forgotten over the years considered proper and polite, and she sits in her chair, back slouching with exhaustion as though the bags under her eyes have weight and are dragging the rest of her down, her grip on the handle of the cup similar to the way one would hold a coffee mug while reading the paper. She's not sure whether to thank God or Alfred, or wonder whether they are actually one, when she realizes the tea is caffeinated, a side effect of which being her eyes focusing enough that she can see the matching set of bags under Alfred's eyes that drag her straight into a concerned tone of her own. "Your turn." She takes another long drink from her tea, only barely able to see his eyebrow arch as he finishes his sip.

“You’re not the only one who gets nightmares, Miss Gordon,” he says simply, and in a pale imitation of him, she doesn’t press for more. She can hardly imagine what Alfred has nightmares about. She wishes that she could be sure it was the simple things that civilians dream of, but she doubts that’s the case. She wonders if the things that everyone in the family has been through haunts him as profoundly as it haunts the rest of them. She wonders if he dreams of Jason’s body after he was beaten with that crowbar, if he dreams of the night that Bruce’s parents were shot in a dirty alleyway, if he dreams of the night that _she_ was shot in her own home. She wonders if he sees yellow grins and green question marks when he closes his eyes the way the rest of them do. Before she has too much time to reflect on the thought, he says, "It's just difficult sometimes." He seems to struggle for a moment to find the words. "Knowing... To know, that you're sending children to their deaths." His voice is as calm and polite as ever, but his eyes are glazed over in a way that she recognizes and she resists the temptation to rest a hand on his shoulder until he seems to have snapped back into reality.

“That’s not all that we do,” she offers once his eyes have returned to normal. The tea is getting cold, and she puts the cup down gently on the table. “A lot of us got into the business too young, and some of us suffered for it.” Jason’s adolescent face flashes through her mind and she winces. “Things were taken from us that we can’t get back. That’s why we do it though, isn’t it? So we might save another kid from going through all of the messed up stuff we went through.”

He smiles fondly, taking a sip of his lukewarm tea, and gives her a mischievous look. “I do no such thing.” She snorts and, rather than responding that he _helps_ , which he has to already know by now, she just goes back to drinking her tea in the quiet. He takes her cup once she’s emptied it, dutifully moving to the sink to wash it, and she drums the fingers on her good hand against the surface of the table.

"You're... not the only one," she says, quietly. "I'm not going to say we all think about it, or that any one of us is thinking about it all of the time, but... There are times when you just can't push it back. I... God, I remember when Tim first started out as Robin. Bruce was apprehensive... almost mad. Dick seemed... confused... and awkward. I was terrified."

She sighs and stares off into the distance. "The memories of all of the stuff Dick went through as Robin, all of the stuff I went through as Batgirl... Of that night at the house with dad, of what happened to Jason... _Everything_ , it was all still so fresh. I couldn't believe that we were dragging another kid into this life, just like that. A kid with a family, a kid who was still in high school. I couldn't believe that after everything-- everything we had just seen, everything we had just been through-- we were just going to let another teenage boy put on the mask like any kid has any business doing what we did. I certainly didn't. Every time one of those kids calls me while they're in costume, I get so worried... This is gonna be the time that they're dying. This is gonna be the time that I can't help them..."

“Sometimes, there is nothing we can do to help. It isn’t anyone’s fault, Miss Gordon.” He looks haunted for a moment, and then he’s back to washing the dishes, leaving her wondering how it is he deals with everything. The air in the room feels heavy, but her chest feels lighter than it has in a while. It's been a long time since she had a talk with Alfred, a longer time still since she had a talk about something this serious with anyone. There’s a distinct comfort in it, and she is about to ask for another cup of tea when she hears two soft sets of footsteps announcing someone’s presence.

Selina wears an oversized t-shirt that Barbara knows is Bruce's, resting her hand on the shoulder of the little boy walking next to her, and just as Alfred is wearing a matching set of silk pajamas that look like something a child should be wearing, Damian wears only a pair of boxers that she does not think suit a kid his age, though she does notice that he seems to be cradling a stuffed animal of some sort.

"Hey, Little D." Barbara doesn't mean to make her voice so soft, and she's sure Damian will snap for it, but the small pout he wears reminds her too much of the fact that he's just a kid, and it brings the conversation she and Alfred were just having crashing to the front of her brain. Her eyes lift to the bedhead and bags standing next to the kid. "Selina."

As Damian’s stuffed animal moves, Barbara realizes that what he is holding is actually Alfred the Cat, the scruffy tuxedo stray that Alfred got for him months ago. “Do not call me ‘Little D’,” he mumbles, just loud enough to be heard over the loud purring of the cat.

Ignoring him, she lets a small smile break her face.

“Did we wake you up, kiddo?” He makes a disgusted face, clearly not impressed with the alternative nickname ‘kiddo’ but seeming resigned to the fact that she isn’t going to use his formal name. His sour expression reminds her of Bruce when he was trying to be intimidating in a very unserious way during her Batgirl days, and she wonders if his expression when he is legitimately angry looks anything like Bruce’s deadly serious interrogation face.

“He knocked on the door a couple of minutes ago saying he had a nightmare,” Selina says before Damian can make some sort of excuse, and Barbara is surprised by how inherently childish it seems to her. He's glaring at Selina now, and if he were any one of the older kids, she might have hit him. But he's just a kid. He's not an almost-nineteen-year-old high school dropout with more brains than both of his older brothers combined, or a twenty-five-year-old cop in one of the most corrupt cities in the United States. He's eleven years old. He sleeps with his cat and he makes half of his decisions based on how much they'll impress his dad. No matter how old or tough he acts, just like all of the other Robins before him, he's still only a child. “Figured we’d come down here, get some water, and talk a little bit,” she dismisses.

Alfred gets up from his seat without another word and grabs a green plastic cup that looks too cheap and plain to belong here with their fine china and ornate actually-made-of-silver silverware and fills it with ice water from a glass pitcher in the fridge. Damian sniffs as he takes it as though to communicate _thank you, but also remember that I am still distinctly above you_ and then calls for Ace, who pads after him out of the kitchen, leaving the three adults alone. “You two looking out for each other?” Selina looks between them, pointing a single long nail. They both nod.

She looks over her shoulder for a second, as though to make sure Damian isn’t there, before smiling at them. “I’ll keep looking after him, then.”


	6. Antre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of course, everything does feel less ominous with a turkey running in circles and an eleven-year-old chasing gleefully after it.
> 
> * * *
> 
> This chapter was beta read by a user who chose to remain anonymous and [caffeinewentz](http://archiveofourown.org/users/caffeinewentz)!
> 
>  
> 
> **This chapter contains a whole lot of numbers. Reader discretion is advised. The author will post a synopsis in the comments section.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> antre  
> n. cave

The air is as cold as she remembers. It’s July, and yet she feels the need to grab a sweater from upstairs. As it stands, she tugs the fabric of her T-shirt more securely against her skin and wheels herself further into the cave while she looks around. Damian has practically turned it into his own private menagerie, but it is otherwise the same as she remembers it being, with a giant computer system tucked into one corner as though it were an afterthought and the trinket display lining up one wall. She smiles fondly at the memory of the giant penny.

Of course, everything does feel less ominous with a turkey running in circles and an eleven-year-old chasing gleefully after it.

She thinks that the small changes are exaggerated by nostalgia. She hasn’t been to the cave since she began her career as Oracle, always preferring to operate from her own hideout on her own terms, and she supposes that there was a part of her that expected it to be full of reminders of a life she couldn’t have anymore. That part of her was a large part of the reason that she hasn’t visited the cave in years. Instead of being a carbon copy of the cave that she had grown to consider a sort of second home, though, a cave that she had helped to fill with memories, it has been through obvious development. There are still the small reminders of the past, of course, the biggest of which being her old costume strung up with the other old costumes in a display case, but it has a distinctly different vibe.

Alongside Jason’s old suit, stained with blood and filled with holes and burn marks from events she supposes no one had the heart to fully wash away, she sees Bruce’s old Batman costume, crisp and looking like it’s ready to be picked up again any day now. Looking around, she sees more trinkets strewn about in a manner she can only describe as haphazardly organized. Deathstroke’s sword is in a display case near the pedestal with Harvey’s original two-headed coin, and a dinosaur egg has joined the mechanical dinosaur that has been a part of the cave longer than even she has had access to it, one of the few memorabilia that she doesn’t know the story behind. She can’t exactly say the air smells like manure because she has never had the displeasure of working with the substance, but it is certainly a less pleasant smell than she is used to from the cave even if the smell of sweaty boys and bats and stronger medication than she’d ever worked with was never something she particularly loved.

The turkey flaps his wings aggressively as Damian catches him, jumping from his grasp and hiding behind the heifer, who lays in a small pile of hay and dozes while Alfred the Cat licks his paws on her back. Damian pouts and crosses his arms, but doesn’t chase after the bird. He’s still wearing an expensive-looking civilian sweater as opposed to the Robin costume, and Barbara supposes even he is afraid of Alfred’s wrath if the butler has to wash the smell of cow out of cashmere. As though sensing he’s been thought of, Alfred approaches and offers Damian an unfinished bowl of macaroni and cheese.

She pushes herself to the computer and doesn’t waste time gasping at the three-monitor display or marvelling at how large the main screen is or running her fingers over the keyboard in amazement. She turns it on and immediately begins to search Kadhabat Bariya’s bank transaction history. There have been twelve transactions since the incident with Onomatopoeia, all of which, she notices, took place on the same date.

She squints at the details. All of them were clearly done online, as the time lists every interaction as “04:19 July 9, 2016” despite how many there are. She recognizes that 4:19 in the morning would have been just three minutes after the police were leaving her apartment-- after the plant told her the number of cards. She squints at the numbers.

 **04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,010.00 deposited.   
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,000.01 deposited.  
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,101.10 deposited.   
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,010.01 deposited.   
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,011.10 deposited.   
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,001.11 deposited.   
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,001.10 deposited.   
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,101.01 deposited.   
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,011.10 deposited.   
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,110.01 deposited.   
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,001.01 deposited.  
**04:19 July 9, 2016** $10,101.00 deposited.

She’s not sure of the significance of the number ten thousand, of which every payment is within $110. In numerology, she knows it is symbolic of fertility, but doubts that has to do with anything. Of the 52 times the number is mentioned in the Bible, the only one she can think of that might have any relevance is _1 Corinthians 4:15_ , and notes to keep an eye on her father for signs of threat. It’s only as she’s reading the transaction history for the third time and her eyes skip over a decimal point that she thinks to cross-reference the numbers with binary.

She has a newly determined expression when she asks Alfred for a piece of paper and a pen, and she notices Damian watch over her shoulder curiously as she quickly writes the numbers down, adding a 0 before each string of numbers so it fits the pattern of a binary code.

“0100 1000, capital H... 0100 0001, capital A... 0101 0110, capital V...” She mumbles under her breath. She’s thankful that her non-dominant hand was the one that was broken as she pulls away, squinting at the numbers and their associated letters, all capitalized. “H A V I N G F U N Y E T,” she reads aloud. _Fun? Whose idea of fun is this?_ She sighs and rubs at her eyes in the attempt to banish a migraine.

Bruce sets the paper down next to the keyboard when he’s finished reading. “He’s playing a game with you,” he says, as though she hasn’t already figured this out on her own. She glares at him to illustrate the point. “The question is: Does he really think that all of this is just in good fun?” The more petty part of her doubts it. Her brother has spent a large part of their lives in the back of her mind, reminding her that some people are just _sick,_ but she’s always had difficulty writing off serious crimes as illness.

“He killed a kid, Bruce. He _strategically murdered_ a little boy in a park just to get to me. He has to know that what he’s doing is wrong.” Bruce nods. Damian looks skeptical at the term _little boy,_ likely remembering that Gilbert Shepherd was his age.

As they both look like they are about to respond, the page reloads.

 **15:27 July 11, 2016** $10,010.00 deposited.  
**15:27 July 11, 2016** $10,010.01 deposited.

“H I,” she reports dutifully, squinting at the screen as the page begins to reload again. Quickly, she begins a trace in the attempt to track where the transactions are coming from. If she were on her own system, it’d be a guaranteed find.

 **15:28 July 11, 2016** $1,100.11 deposited.  
 **15:28 July 11, 2016** $1,110.00 deposited.  
**15:28 July 11, 2016** $10,010.00 deposited.  
**15:28 July 11, 2016** $10,011.11 deposited.  
**15:28 July 11, 2016** $10,101.01 deposited.  
**15:28 July 11, 2016** $10,100.10 deposited.  
**15:28 July 11, 2016** $10,100.11 deposited.

She doesn’t need to read past the first two to know what it says. _38 hours._ She knows, of course. She’s been doing a mental countdown since she found the warning, only unsure of when the thing started. Apparently, from the minute her father dispatched the police to the clock tower. “He’s reinforcing the threat against James,” she announces through gritted teeth, her good hand balled into a fist next to the mouse.

It takes three whole minutes for the page to reload, and when it does, she understands why. The longest string of transaction history she’s ever seen covers the page.

 **15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,010.01 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,100.11 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,010.00 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,011.11 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,101.01 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,011.00 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,001.00 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,001.11 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,011.11 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,100.00 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,000.01 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,110.01 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,011.01 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,001.01 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,011.11 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,101.00 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,001.00 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,101.01 deposited.  
**15:31 July 11, 2016** $10,001.01 deposited.

Furiously, she slams her fist against the arm of her chair when she reads **_15:32 July 11, 2016_ ** _$373,685.63 withdrawn._ This, she notes, leaves the final balance as $10,010.11. The letter K. Immediately, she switches to the trace, only to see “Signal interrupted” in large, green letters. “Damn it!” She turns to face Bruce and Damian, who are both watching her as though they are afraid of what she might do. “He logged off! I can’t find him! And look at this!” She gestures to the screen, and warily, Bruce approaches, leaning close to the screen and looking over the numbers as they are supposed to mean something before he settles on the withdrawn amount. “I can’t imagine what sort of thing is that expensive!”

She can. Though it’s admittedly low for Deadshot’s prices, she knows that assassins and mercenaries for hire with nearly as much skill have much lower price ranges, especially for customers that they favor like the Joker or Ra’s al Ghul. She imagines that’s more than sufficient bribery for a guard at Arkham who will look the other way while some professional at making things look like accidents sneaks into her brother’s cell and fridges him just to get to her. She had been upset when her legs were taken from her as a move to torture her father, and the thought that it will be done to someone else angers her just as much. The fact that it’s going to be done to her brother and she’s practically helpless to stop that piles guilt and anxiety on top of that.

She feels a hand on her shoulder and is surprised to see Damian’s face when she looks up from where her gaze has faltered to the desk. “If Grayson has taught me anything, it is that throwing temper tantrums does not often change anything.” He offers her the paper where she has written the strings of numbers, and the moment she has grasped the bottom, pulls until it is ripped in half. “If Todd has taught me anything, though, it is that it does sometimes.”

She rips the paper into quarters with a childish glee. Afterward, she feels a strange sense of calm wash over her, like playing in the ocean and building sandcastles on the beach as a child, and then being dragged under the surface of the water, but you aren’t drowning or swimming. You’re just under the water, _being._

“We can use this,” she starts, turning back to the computer screen and opening Arkham’s system. “The fact that whoever we’re dealing with knows binary shows that they have at least a modicum of intelligence, and probably some experience with technology, if not computers specifically. And if they don’t have that experience with technology that we’re looking for, then they have to have an obsessive enough personality to learn binary just to get to someone; in this case: me. That also means that we need to look at people with a motive. Someone who’s been in Arkham for a long time after I arrested them, or someone who’s known for hating Batgirl. Maybe even someone who’s known for hating Oracle, if they’re particularly intelligent and could feasibly have discovered my identity somehow.”

“That doesn’t give us a lot of options,” Damian points out in a tone Barbara thinks is going for optimism.

“More than you’d think. A study a couple of years ago showed that only 48% of Gotham’s arrested criminals that year were uneducated. 52% had at least their high school diploma, with 16% having an associate’s degree, 11% having a bachelor’s degree, and an astonishing 15% having their master’s degree or doctorate, which counted big bads like Harley Quinn and Mr. Freeze, who were both doctors before they turned to crime. I suspect the only reason she doesn’t go by ‘Doctor Harley Quinn’ is because it’s kind of a mouthful.” She pauses a moment, glancing over her shoulder at them. “Say what you want about Gotham City’s crime rates, but we have an amazing educational system.”

Barbara leans forward toward the screen, resting her chin on her palm. “Still, it eliminates some options. 1,011, the number of cards posted on my wall, is an odd number, and though it isn’t a prime number, it’s only factors are 3 and 337, which means that Harvey is out. Cobblepot and Isley have got no motive, so they’re off the table, too.” She squints and manually dismisses the files. “If Tetch is incredibly pretty, which we know he is, he could have motive after I beat him half to death my first few months as Batgirl... That was years ago, though, so we’re going to put him at the bottom of the list.” Running her eyes over the names for a fourth time, she ticks off names in her head. “Right now, our main suspects have to be Nygma and the Joker.”

She opens the security camera feeds for the Joker and Nygma’s cells on separate monitors and nervously opens James’ in another. She doesn’t have time to fuss, though. Nygma’s room is suspiciously empty.

“He’ll be in therapy,” she hears from over her shoulder. “Every Monday, 3:30 to 5:30. He was making a real effort to recover, too, last time I was there. He’s not the sort for grudges and revenge, anyway. I’d be shocked if he was the one trying to get to you.” Selina slinks over to the monitor, pointing at one of the screens. “The Joker, on the other hand, has therapy Fridays. Late.”

Sure enough, when she looks, he’s not pacing or plotting like she suspects someone else might be. He just stands in the middle of the room, grinning unsettlingly as though he’s nothing but a movie prop meant for standing around and holding the same creepy expression until he’s thrown away or otherwise dismissed. There are books scattered about the room, old and hardcover, and she can smell the dust on their pages from here. She zooms and enhances the image, but dismisses them as irrelevant when she catches the sorts of corny old jokes her dad might have told when she was growing up. “What mouse walks on two legs?” She scoffs aloud.

She zooms out again, returning to the full view of the room. To her horror, he’s looking directly at the camera. To make it worse, he winks.


	7. Final Author's Note

_Hey guys! Darla here._

_As some of the people who have stuck around with me and this fic since the beginning know, I've been struggling (ha) with depression and anxiety for years. I've been diagnosed with depression, social anxiety, PTSD, and OCD at different points in my life starting when I was 13, and all of these things combine at the worst possible moments to make my life particularly hard for me. There are days where it's hard to get up in the morning, and even weirder (harder) days where I find myself staying up until five in the morning because I am deathly exhausted but somehow don't have the energy to get up and go to bed._

_Currently, I'm a college student. I'm taking 16 credit hours in classes so I can get my degree in teaching and go on into a career I've been passionate about since I was a little kid. I have a really wonderful girlfriend, and if you check out my account beyond just this fic then you'll see the dozen or so gift fics I've spoiled her with because I adore the concepts we come up with for those characters. I write something every single day. Poetry more often than fanfiction these days, but the point of the matter is that between AO3 and my Tumblr, I post something original that I have written every day, the only exceptions being when I was in the hospital for about a week in April, which resulted in my being in a wheelchair until this June. Ironic, given the character I often choose to write about._

_Mustering up the motivation for all of those fics and poems, as well as college and relationships, is **hard**. It's especially hard right now because my depression and anxiety are really kicking me in the ass, and as we head into September, I'm sure my PTSD will be worsening proportionally as well. Sometimes I lay in bed at night and wonder why I'm not writing, but it feels as though even if I wrote an entire novel I wouldn't really be accomplishing anything. Writing is something that usually makes me happy, but when I am in a funk like this it is just another difficult obligation to uphold, and it's not fair to you as my readers to make it look like I'm going to be updating this fic sometime soon (I make a lot of promises when I'm having a motivation high for a few hours or even days that I'll try to get a new chapter up by the end of that week, and I end up crashing again before the promised date has come to pass and ultimately disappointing everyone, especially myself and **especially** you). More than that, it's not fair to me to keep looking back on this fic and feeling guilty about it when I have other things to be doing with my life.  
_

_Anyone who reads this will notice that I haven't updated this fic with actual content since January. I've blamed it on a writer's block and that's not necessarily true or fair. As you can see, I've been writing plenty in the last seven and a half months or so. I suppose it has more to do with the sort of fic this is. Multi-chapters are hard to stay passionate about, and even if you maintain that passion, it can be very hard to keep up an update schedule and prioritize a new chapter when there's another idea you want to do._

_I will always hold a special place in my heart for Struggling. It was one of my first real fics, one of the things that inspired me to get really into writing and **definitely** one of the things that inspired me to get really into writing for DC and, more particularly, DickBabs. However, when I started this fic way back in July of 2017 (I believe that really is when the first draft went up, roughly, and it's crazy for me to think that it's been over a year since then), I had no idea what I was doing, with this story or as a writer in general. I went in planning to do a multi-chapter with DickBabs and some plot but not really knowing how long it was going to be or knowing at all what that plot was going to be about. The first draft of this fic was actually deleted, and this is the second, after I finally made an outline when I saw so many people cared as much about my baby as I did._

_I will be keeping the outline for Struggling in my Google Docs so I can come back to this fic if and when I have the time, motivation, and energy for it. In fact, I think the most likely scenario for me ever finishing this fic is to pre-write everything over there and then post the chapters weekly or bi-weekly over here while I work on a sequel._

_But when it comes to leaving Struggling up on AO3... It would be unfair to all of you, and to me, to leave this on my account as though it is a lingering promise that surely one day it will update. Some day in the future, you may find this fic again after I've started to re-write, and I would love to see comments from old, dedicated readers if and when that happens saying, "Hey, I remember your old draft!" I think it would be funny to laugh about that sort of thing. But this version has to be orphaned._

**_It will still be on the site._ ** _While I am orphaning Struggling so it is no longer among my works on my account, I am not going to be permanently deleting it. However, Struggling, at least this version of Struggling, **is never going to be finished.** I am not in a place in my life right now to work on a project like this. It is stressful as all hell to work on a super plot-heavy multi-chapter where every chapter has a 2k minimum and you teach yourself binary just to leave fun little hints where everything just so happens to work out perfectly in your favor. And yes, it is fun to do things like that every once in a while. But it is **much** more stressful than it is fun and, honestly, is much more stressful than it is currently worth to me._

_I will still be writing smaller projects, like my Concresce series within the League of Legends fandom and, of course, my various Batfam oneshots (or that Channukah fic, which I really **do** want to finish eventually, but that'll take... a bit longer). If you'd like to check those out, or even go read my dumb poetry on Tumblr, then I'd adore the support! But if you're only sticking around for this fic, then I'm sorry to tell you that it's being abandoned._

_I plan to officially orphan it on **Saturday, August 25** at **11:59 PM CDT**. I am planning to leave my name attached to it by selecting the "Leave a copy of my pseud on" option, but after that date, it will no longer be accessible directly through my account. Thank you all for understanding, or, hopefully, at least trying to._


End file.
